The Future of Flesh: A Cultural Survey of the Body

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The Future of Flesh

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T h e F u t u r e of F l esh: A C u lt u r a l Su rv e y of t h e Body

Edited by Zoe Detsi-Diamanti, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, and

Effie Yiannopoulou

THE FUTURE OF FLESH: A CULTURAL SURVEY OF THE BODY

Copyright © Zoe Detsi-Diamanti, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, and Effie Yiannopoulou, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–61347–8 ISBN-10: 0–230–61347–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Tereza, Konstantinos, Maria Anna, Katerina, and Christina, with all our Love


C on t e n t s

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

1. Toward the Futures of Flesh: An Introduction Zoe Detsi-Diamanti, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Effie Yiannopoulou

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Part I

Disintegrating Bodies

2. The Past of Flesh: Mortal and Immortal Bodies in Ancient Greek Poetry Ekaterini Douka-Kabitoglou 3. The Dead and Dying Body from Hume to Now Thomas Laqueur

19 43

4. Langscapes of Death, Inscapes of Memory, and Philoktetes’ Postmodern Painscript Savas Patsalidis

61

5. Fleshly Evils: Clinical and Cultural (IL)Logics of the Chronic Pain Subject in Contemporary U.S. Society Cindy L. Linden

79

Part II

Artistic Representations of Mutating Flesh

6. Chuck Palahniuk and the Violence of Beauty Elisabeth Bronfen

101

7. Eye, Agency, and Bodily Becomings: Processing Breast Cancer in and through Images Katve-Kaisa Kontturi

115

8. Fantastic 4-Body-ings: Ideal Grotesqueness in the Comic-Book Culture Christina Dokou

133

9. Emergence: New Flesh and Life in New Media Art Edwina Bartlem

155

viii

C on t e n t s

Part III

Posthuman Enfleshments

10. Fleshing Out Virtual Bodies: White Heterosexual Masculinity in Contemporary Cyberfantasy Cinema Nicola Rehling

181

11. Flesh Encounters Biotechnology: Speculations on the Future of the Biological Machine Domna Pastourmatzi

199

12. Modernity and the Other Body: The Human Contract with Mute Animality Linda Williams

221

13. Meta(l)flesh Rosi Braidotti

241

Contributors

263

Index

267

Figu r e s

7.1 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5

Sketches (1999) The Young Family (2002) EXOSKELETON Semi-Living Dolls Display (2000) A Semi-Living Worry Doll Extra Ear: Ear On Arm

119 157 157 168 169 172


Ac k now l e dgm e n t s

Our sincerest thanks and gratitude go to our contributors for their unfailing patience and trust in us throughout this project. Their intellectual vigor, enthusiasm, and original research have inspired and illuminated the main concerns of The Future of Flesh and made the task of editing a profoundly rewarding experience for us. We are also grateful to our friends and colleagues, Ruth Parkin-Gounelas and Maria Margaroni, for their constructive comments on an earlier version of the introduction, as well as the Editorial Director, Farideh Koohi-Kamali, and Associate Editor, Brigitte Shull, of Palgrave Macmillan for their encouragement and excellent cooperation. Finally, we extend our special thanks to Tasos Paschalis for his sterling technical support and enduring humor, and our librarians, Fotini Stavrou and Kleoniki Skoularika, for their invaluable help during the research stage of this project. The editors and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material: The Nobel Foundation 2005 for permission to reprint Harold Pinter’s poem “The Dead” from his Nobel Lecture, “Art, Truth, and Politics.” Helena Hietanen for Sketches (1999), color photographs taken by Eva Persson. Patricia Piccinini for The Young Family (2002), Silicone, polyurethane, leather, plywood, human hair 80x150x110cm, photograph by Graham Baring. Stelarc for EXOSKELETON, Cankarjev Dom, Warehouse, Vhrinka, Slovenia (2003), photograph by Igor Skafar—Robot Construction—F18 Hamburg, funded by Kampnagel, Hamburg, and for EXTRA EAR: EAR ON ARM, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Australia (2006), photograph by Nina Sellars—Surgical Team: Malcolm Lesavoy, MD; Sean Bidic, MD; William Futrell, MD. Project coordinator: Jeremy Taylor, October Films, funded by Discovery US. The Tissue Culture and Art for Semi-Living Dolls Display (2000), and A Semi-Living Worry Doll H, McCoy Cell line, Biodegradable/ bioabsorbable Polymers and Surgical Sutures Dimensions: 2cm x 1.5cm x 1cm from The Tissue Culture & Art(ificial) Wombs Installation, Ars Electronica (2000). Lexington Books for a slightly modified version of Nicola Rheling’s essay “Terminal Bodies: White Masculinity and Virtual Disembodiment in Popular Cinema” which will be published in her forthcoming book ExtraOrdinary Men: White Heterosexual Masculinity and Contemporary Popular Culture.


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Towa r d t h e Fu t u r es of Fl esh: A n I n t roduc t ion Zoe Detsi-Diamanti, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Effie Yiannopoulou

“Death” Where was the dead body found? Who found the dead body? Was the dead body dead when found? How was the dead body found? Who was the dead body? Who was the father or daughter or brother Or uncle or sister or mother or son Of the dead and abandoned body? Was the body dead when abandoned? Was the body abandoned? By whom had it been abandoned? Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey? What made you declare the dead body dead? Did you declare the dead body dead? How well did you know the dead body? How did you know the dead body was dead? Did you wash the dead body Did you close both its eyes Did you bury the body Did you leave it abandoned Did you kiss the dead body —Harold Pinter

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I

D i a m a n t i, K i t s i-M i t a kou, Yi a n nop ou l ou

Body and Change

f truth in art is elusive, truth in life and politics should not be so; it should be sought after and located despite its multicenteredness, declares the dramatist Harold Pinter in his Nobel acceptance speech, delivered in December 2005. In his poem called “Death,” which is the epilogue to his lecture, Pinter, “as a citizen,” pronounces the dead body the ultimate reality. The tortured, violated, victimized, racialized, or Orientalized flesh that haunts modern politics, Pinter asserts, is not a matter of fantasy or subjective evaluation. Although today’s dominant Western political discourses have taken pains to highlight the value of democratic institutions, civil liberties, human rights, and respect for life, there exists one compact and forceful nucleus that disproves their claims and presents a different version of reality: the changing, decaying flesh of the tortured body. By underscoring the callousness of the Western gaze, the poem draws attention to the expendability of flesh today; dead bodies are reduced to dispensable waste matter, worthless and superfluous items one needn’t even bother to count. At the same time, the corpse, paradoxically, acquires the power to transform the ruthless voice of the speaker into a voice that cares. The repetitive and nonsensical “who?/where?/how?/by whom?” journalistic questions with which the poem opens become in the last stanza statements suggestive of the impending need to attend to the corpse, as they retain the grammatical form of a question yet lack a question mark. The dead body must be revered and valued, buried and kissed, because, after all, the dead body is never only a dead body. From the mutilated corpses of male heroes in the Homeric epic tradition, to the injured veterans of the Second World War, and today’s chronic pain patients, or cancerous bodies, decaying and mutating bodies have always been loaded signifiers, as some of the chapters in this collection argue. The almost obsessive academic engagement with the body began at least three decades ago. Sarah Nettleton and Jonathan Watson have spoken of “a whole industry of research and scholarship on the body”: conferences on the theme of the body, journals having the body as their topic, courses offered on the body, not to mention the great number of books published every year on the body.1 What is noteworthy is that disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, cultural and critical theory, history, and even biology and medicine, have also focused on bodies that are unstable, fluid, and transformable, involved in an endless process of becoming. The centuries-old debates of nature versus nurture and the materiality of bodies still remain unresolved and have generated a multitude of titles such as Indeterminate Bodies (Segal, Naomi, Lib Taylor, and Roger Cook, 2003), Contested Bodies (Holliday, Ruth, and John Hassard, 2001), Real Bodies (Evans, Mary, and Ellie Lee, 2002), Leaky Bodies (Schildrick, 1997), Flexible Bodies (Martin, 1994), Volatile Bodies (Grosz, 1994), Bodies That Matter (Butler, 1993), and Body Modification (Featherstone, 2000). Whether change is biophysical, technologically induced, or related to theoretical perceptions of the body as dynamically malleable, 2 it is a term that has become ineluctably attached to the term “body.”

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It is the shifting and diverse meanings of body transformation, in particular, that have been of special interest to scholars. Body modification, for example, such as piercing, cutting, and implant insertion, but also bodybuilding or anorexia, as Mike Featherstone contends, may be practices that imply control over one’s body. They denote rejection of oppressive mechanisms, but, in other cases, they send the opposite message and imply compliance to and promotion of governing strategies.3 Likewise, dismissing the idea of the biological body as a bedrock and insisting on its fluids and flows may open up the possibility of alternative forms of embodiment, especially for subjects who have been sexually and racially discriminated against and, consequently, have been long tied to biological determinism. Yet, insisting on transformation may not always serve feminist political ends, as Linda Birke has argued convincingly.4 Irigaray’s “labial politics,” for instance, which stress the multiplicity of female embodiment and proclaim that fluidity is the inherent excess of the feminine, run the risk of becoming reductionist or ahistorical, as a number of feminist critics have pointed out.5 “The Future of Flesh: A Cultural Survey of the Body” shares many of the concerns of recent scholarship on the body. Its aim, however, is to probe more deeply into the complex signification of bodily transformation and expose its potential for either progressive disruption or reactionary dissemination of narratives of master control. In so doing, it investigates the limits, the politics, and the ethics surrounding corporeal mutation and change in a variety of fields (films, cartoons, literature, theater, art, medicine, history, and popular culture) and through diverse disciplinary approaches (historical, sociological, feminist, postcolonial, medical, and scientific). More specifically, the essays in this collection examine ways in which flesh has been reconceptualized and re-presented in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries and revolve around two main axes. First, they analyze changes in contemporary attitudes to corporeal change such as disability, pain, and death. Second, they highlight recent transformations in the very definition of “flesh.” In addition, “The Future of Flesh” attempts to establish links between present and past practices and politics, as, despite the dramatic transformation of modern flesh, there is a recurrence of certain themes in the body politic. Take, for example, the Platonic division between body and soul, which reappears not only in the seventeenth-century Cartesian split between body and mind but also in modern medical practice; or, the misrepresentation of the biological body and its functions in Western science, which begins with Hippocratic and Galenic hypotheses presented as facts, and reemerges in the Enlightenment with the New Science deploying dominant discourses of the time to construct the image of the “real” body; or, the archaic fascination with dismembering the corpse of the enemy, which one sees reflected in the spectacle of the scaffold, an early modern ritual that returns in today’s bloodthirsty media. Such repetitive patterns call for a careful study of the ways in which the past is reread today, and also of the ways in which our present has already inscribed our future. Going back to classical Greece, Enlightenment Britain, and nineteenth-century Europe, we believe,

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may provide new understandings of postmodern embodiments and open up new ways of envisioning the future of flesh today.

Flesh as an Expendable Commodity While the terms “body” and “flesh” have been used interchangeably throughout this collection, the more immediate association of flesh with smelly materiality (as opposed to the abstractedness and generalizability of the term “body”) and its plasticity (as opposed to the bulkiness of the body) make it a more accurate word to use in relation to transformation and change. Flesh, we believe—more than bodies—is at stake in our posthuman times, in the sense that it is flesh that is subject to increased control either in the laboratory or in the marketplace and is caught up in processes of modification that seek to master and profit from it. For, although the body is inescapably physical, it has been repeatedly theorized as a category entangled in cultural and social practices, and it has, therefore, lost the concreteness, baseness, and contagiousness that contemporary cultural systems continue to associate with flesh. The persistent disavowal of fleshiness, manifested as it is in its inclusion in contemporary disciplinary procedures, speaks eloquently of what is for Giorgio Agamben the aporetic relationship that still structures the link between zoe and bio, or (bare) life and logos, in our Western (bio)political cultures. To the extent that flesh shares in the unsettling attributes of “bare life,” it can only be engaged with and appreciated in the form of an exception, or as Werner Hamacher and David Wellbery put it, as “something that is included solely through an exclusion.” 6 This is not new to postmodernity. Flesh has been marked negatively since antiquity. In the Gospel of John, for example, “flesh” refers to the natural body and covers the limited resources of our natural life and learning. Likewise, in the Gospel of Paul, flesh “carries the notion of the body as caught in the throes of a fallen creation”;7 it is the body seen under the aspect of its bondage to sin and death. For Paul, the body, unlike flesh, “is not reducible to a material object or bio-physical entity, for it belongs to the moral and spiritual universe as much as to the physical world.” The New Testament, therefore, argues not for the rejection but for the redemption of the body and “its transformation into a site of moral and spiritual disclosure.”8 The early modern conceptualization of flesh also reflects this aversion to flesh. The Enlightenment tendency to coffin the dead in cemeteries conveniently removed from inhabited areas was, as Thomas Laqueur argues, an attempt to reduce bodies to abstractions and, consequently, do away with the decomposing, putrefying flesh of corpses crowding in churchyards and their deleterious effluvia. Still, even if the body was removed to extramural burial places and placed out of sight, there was nothing to prevent its flesh from rotting underground or to divest it of its infectious potential. This idea of flesh as threatening matter seems to have lingered on to haunt our posthuman times. Contemporary scientific and technological discourses and practices betray an overwhelming desire to manipulate flesh and control

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its fearful potentialities and undesirable limitations. The fleshy transformations taking place in the scientific laboratory today attest precisely to the status of flesh as “raw,” expendable material in a bio-industrial age. Within a context of political expediency and global economic control, the notion of flesh as organic matter that can be probed into, fabricated, and destroyed has led to its steady depreciation. Has human flesh become what Linda Williams calls in Part III of this collection “industrialized commodity?” Globalization and international competition in biomedical research promote a commercial language of supply and demand that defines human flesh as a malleable system of reusable parts that cater to the growing market for human organs, tissue, cells, eggs, and sperm.9 In our technologically advanced society, flesh is increasingly treated as an expendable commodity, subject to constant circulation, experimentation, and transformation. Through biotechnology and genetic engineering, existing bodies are modified and species boundaries transgressed at a genetic and cellular level,10 and new flesh and new bodies are created through in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene splicing. From a different perspective, cosmetic surgery sustains this scientific fascination with transforming and doing away with undesirable flesh through processes such as face-lifting and liposuction, which contribute to the fantasy of controlling the human body. It is this fascination with bodily transformation and transcendence that has led a number of science fiction writers to address a crucial question: if flesh can be regarded as superfluous, expendable matter, then what is the human brain? In their work, the old dualism body/soul is recast as matter/ information, with the brain conceived of as a complex network of transferable bits of data.11 Flesh is increasingly relegated to the status of unwanted materiality that can be pushed aside while the center of human identity is located in the mind, the storehouse of information (knowledge and memories).12 What underwrites this tendency to dispense with flesh is the desire to transgress corporeal limitations and elude forms of social and biological determinism that are connected to the materiality of flesh. Ironically enough, the more the body is seen as increasingly vulnerable to disease, surveillance, and identity critiques, the strongest this desire seems to be. Can, however, the transformability of human flesh eventually lead to an escape from social, racial, and gender inhibitions? Either as “data-made-flesh”13 or as virtual body, human flesh remains stubbornly bound to questions of identity and selfhood. This is particularly evident in Nicola Rehling’s essay in this volume, which questions the power of the virtual body to escape its gender and racial identities. By calling attention to a number of filmic versions of cyberspace that promote the virtualization of flesh as escape from death, pain, and gravity, Rehling argues that sexual and racial identities continue to exist in virtual space; they are still imprinted on the flesh and generate new hierarchies. Although flesh can be transformed and transcended, it is still saturated with meanings that are imbricated in ideologies of gender, race, and class. Despite the fantasies of virtual disembodiment and the utopian discourses stating that virtual reality will liberate us from the constraints of the material body, there seems to be “no escape from the meat.”14

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Mut(il)ation? Is this the (bleak) future of flesh? Does bodily mutation, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, equal bodily mutilation? This volume’s responses to these questions are varied; they are sensitive to the complexities, the diverse affective investments, and the historical subtleties and cultural dynamics that have produced the meanings of corporeal change current in the West. Although all the essays in the volume recognize the need to engage with the ethics and the politics encoded into the contemporary attitudes to bodily transformation, they produce differing valuations of its potentialities and political significance. Some essays argue, for example, that, in spite of claims to the contrary, we still live in a world of high modernity, with flesh very much given meaning within the binary structure of “mind versus body.” They hold that bodily transformations as practiced in the laboratory and the health clinic, or, equally, as celebrated in postmodern and posthuman discourses, have not in effect changed the inherited power relations that structure the meanings of flesh today (Williams, Rehling, Pastourmatzi). Yet, this volume also brings to view alternative understandings of bodily change that prioritize its potential for disrupting essentializing definitions of enfleshment and the forces that keep them in place. To Rosi Braidotti, the body remains a “privileged site of transformation and reinscription of the natural, through reincorporation of the technological” (“Meta(l)flesh”). These theoretical positions assume flesh to be an unstable definitional and ontological category and endow it with the potential of disrupting existing gender, racial, and class discourses (see, for example, the essays by Braidotti, Bronfen, and Dokou). In bringing together such diverse intellectual responses, this volume aims to develop a framework for thinking about bodily transformation that has difference built into it. It is our desire to move away from any monolithic understanding of bodily change as either politically progressive or reactionary and to sketch a more nuanced map of its many and contradictory effects, valuations, and meanings. In formulating these working assumptions, we have been guided by recent developments in the theorizing of mobility (the literal movement of peoples and goods as much as the discursive relocation of ideas). Following Henri Lefebvre’s influential work on the production of space, these formulations maintain that mobility is not an essential quality of life and discourse but a product, a “power-laden geographical phenomenon.”15 As Tim Cresswell contends, “mobility becomes meaningful within systems of domination and resistance, inclusion and exclusion, and is embedded with relations of systematically asymmetrical power relations.”16 As such, it is subject to social, cultural, and historical forces, inevitably contextual and plural and, therefore, variable in terms of the interests it serves and the definitional limits it sets. Following the current critique of both sedentarist and nomadic metaphysics,17 we hope to begin a process of thinking about bodily transformation as neither inherently progressive nor indispensably oppressive (a cog in the well-oiled

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machines of global capitalism, xenophobia, and sexism) but rather as a situated practice that becomes meaningful within specific material circumstances. On a parallel level, this volume also wants to call attention to the realization that different types of fleshy mutation produce different definitions of flesh. Consider, for example, flesh that is implicated in processes of transformation in the scientific laboratory or on the cosmetic surgeon’s table. Both as an organic category and as a concept, flesh is here assumed to be decodable, to obey specific systems of biological, social, gender, racial, and aesthetic rules that regulate its functions and meanings. In a sense, flesh, in these contexts, is subject to change that is acceptable to the degree that it can be predicted. As Elizabeth Grosz has written, “Predictable, measured, regulated transformation, change under specifiable conditions and with determinate effects, seems a readily presumed social prerequisite.”18 It underpins Western political and philosophical discourses on the idea of progress, development, and movement and, as we argue, the scientific experiments with and popular imaginings about mutating flesh—the case of the reproducibility of flesh through cloning as presented in Pastourmatzi’s essay, for example. This kind of bodily transformation assumes deterministic definitions of flesh. Fleshy transformation, however, can also be politically fruitful and ethically challenging. What we are arguing for in this volume is the need for a reconfigured vision, and future, of flesh not as something that is codifiable and, hence, expendable but as what has the power to intervene in cultural practices and perceptions of the world. It is for this reason that, whether critical of contemporary discourses that claim to have redrawn the limits of flesh (such as posthumanism and postmodernism) or celebratory of the power of fleshy hybridization, all essays in this volume articulate a vision of flesh not as a category that is acted upon, read, decoded, and classified but as a material force that acts and changes ways of seeing and habits of being. Of utmost importance to this (re)vision is the need to be attentive to the “radical alterity” of flesh, its disquieting potential for escaping, and often defeating, the “natural” limits imposed on it through custom or biological necessity. Flesh as toute autre is flesh that exists on a limit: the suffering, dying, aging, disintegrating, stretched and disfigured body. It is flesh that we cannot ignore as it keeps returning to knock on our door to surprise and shock us. Flesh reconceptualized in this way participates in what Elizabeth Grosz describes as a revolution that involves “the more disconcerting idea of unpredictable transformation—mutation, metamorphosis—upheaval in directions and arenas with implications or consequences that cannot be known in advance.”19 In light of this, Katve-Kaisa Kontturi’s essay in this volume makes a compelling case for the radical alterity of the dying flesh by means of resignifying the natural disintegration of the cancerous body through art. Reading how Helena Hietanen’s photographs record the changes the disease and the cure bring about in the artist’s body calls attention to the power of the artistically represented decaying flesh to realign the limits of female agency and to redefine life itself. Equally, Edwina Bartlem’s discussion of contemporary

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biological art engages with the disruptive, unpredictable effects that calculated, scientific methods of creating new life-forms have (on viewers) once they are transferred from the scientific laboratory to the art gallery. Re-spatialisation, the particularity of the new context, reconfigures flesh as what surprises spectators out of their certainties. In both these cases, flesh is experienced as an eruption that affects and shocks. Elizabeth Grosz’s ruminations on change and transformation in Becomings are part of a wider problematic that attempts to think through the possibility of conceptualizing futurity, innovation, and creativity as not bound to the laws, the measurability of the present and the past, but as open ended. In equal measure, we feel that the future of flesh is closely tied to a re-signification of the calculated temporality written into acts of fleshy mutation in ways that underline the conceptualization of flesh, outside metaphysical polarities, as “radically” other. As a phrase, “the future of flesh” is generally understood to map out the future ways of articulating and effecting enfleshment. Crucially, however, it also invokes the power of flesh to create new futures, to innovate (in the sense Grosz delimits the term), to confront us with the task of thinking the new in ways that work within, but are not contained by, the limits of the past and present. To our mind, thinking flesh out of the utilitarian discourses that currently extol its measurability might just reinvest Pinter’s “dead body” with alternative possibilities that reflect as much on the death as on the (future) life of flesh.

The Chapters Part I: Disintegrating Bodies Part I consists of four essays that focus on changing Western attitudes toward dying and ill bodies from antiquity to modernity. The logic structuring the first part of the collection revolves around two main concerns: our interest in the dying/disintegrating/ill body and our desire to turn to the past. Different meanings of death imply different definitions of the living body, and, consequently, enfleshment as such. Contemporary debates surrounding the body and the future of flesh need to be traced back to earlier perceptions of embodiment. Preoccupied with heroic and decaying corpses, diseased, and tortured bodies, the essays in this part of the collection manifest how contaminated and contaminating bodies, oscillating between the divine and the animal, are a threat to public order, but in certain cases also a source of fascination. For example, E. Douka-Kabitoglou’s essay, “The Past of Flesh: Mortal and Immortal Bodies in Ancient Greek Poetry,” traces the unstable and mutating concept of the mind/body binary, or its absence, in ancient Greek poetry. The heroic body of the male fighter in Homeric epos, perceived as an integrated whole and able to achieve immortality through glorification, reflects the impossibility of the mind/body dichotomy. The idea of an eternal soul existing independently of the body had not yet been born at the time of

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Homer, as the body of the warrior was capable of achieving divinity. The transition toward a subjectivity that has a body is first recorded in Sapphic poetry with the introduction of the speaking “I” in her poetic speech, as well as Sappho’s emphasis on immediate and sensuous reality. This new psychosomatic geography of the personal ego introduces a tension between matter and mind, which is further enhanced by the transubstantiation of eros into logos. The “thinking” subject/the observing mind not only interprets the dismembered body in love, it also sublimates female flesh through poetry. In a similar manner, in Pindar’s lyric poetry, logos immortalizes the body of the athlete. The victorious champion, however, is not a simple revival of the Homeric warrior. Influenced by the Dionysian cult and Orphic mysteries, Pindar introduces the notion of psyche, which enunciates the modern concept of soma. As a result, the deified body of the athlete becomes the ideal space that will accommodate the immortal soul. This polarization of matter/spirit initiates ancient Greek tragedy, which expresses it in its most profound form. The extreme objectification of the body, its irrevocable divorce from the psyche and its subordination to an inferior and decomposing status, on one hand, as well as the body’s desire to return to oneness through orgiastic mania, on the other, demarcates the birth of tragedy. In his essay “The Dead and Dying Body from Hume to Now,” Thomas Laqueur argues that the pluralism of death in modernity is manifested in the history of the cemetery. Death and the dead body have acquired a dual existence since the eighteenth century. On one hand, the corpse is terrible, freighted with meaning, a constant that stands eternally outside the efforts of science threatening to supplant it. On the other hand, there is nothing metaphysical about death; a dead body is a dead body, a source of pollution, anxiety, and distaste. It is Enlightenment that changed the relation of the living to the dead. The dead body, stripped of its metaphysical centrality, became corrupting human flesh. As dirt out of place, it is made clean again when placed in cemeteries, or displaced into a monument. With the birth of cemeteries, those sanctified places, the dead body became a disappearing body, out of view and smell, and the relationship with dead bodies became more abstract. The bourgeoisie, the self-conscious creators and inhabitants of the cemetery, imagined a new community of the dead, represented in the clean, sweet-smelling, wholly novel, real and symbolic geography of the cemetery, which gave a certain weight, solidity, and credence to a new community of the living. Savas Patsalidis’ contribution, “Langscapes of Death, Inscapes of Memory, and Philoktetes’ Postmodern Painscript,” examines what happens to the suffering (gangrenous) body of Sophocles’ Philoktetes once it migrates from its coherent, hierarchical, and patriarchal microcosm to a postmodern milieu of disruptions, antiessentialisms, uncertainties, and simulacra. The essay’s main thesis is that once the body and its wound are removed from the centre of liberal humanist thought, they acquire the qualities of fiction. In other words, they come to us as a system of structures, of conflicting languages of power that direct our attention away from the psychology and the irreducible essences

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of the suffering “I” and closer to the recognition of subjectivity as a rhetorical schema. To support his point Patsalidis examines John Jesurun’s radical appropriation of Sophocles’ text. Cindy Linden’s essay, “Fleshly Evils: Clinical and Cultural (IL)Logics of the Chronic Pain Subject in Contemporary U.S. Society,” explores how discourses and representations of pain circulating in the United States in the past several decades characterize chronic pain as explosive, ferocious, and destructive. She highlights the modern trend in U.S. narratives of, and about, pain to define the body in chronic pain as a threat to national integrity, economic prosperity, and productivity. Chronic pain patients, Linden argues, promote the circulation of a new national myth, which metonymically substitutes patients for a wartime enemy. At the end of the twentieth century such patients become a primary target of the national campaign against evil. A war is launched against chronic pain patients—those undisciplined, unruly sufferers—who expose the fictiveness of technological progress and undermine the American Ideal. Part II: Artistic Representations of Mutating Flesh The four essays in Part II concern themselves with the issues surrounding the interface between artistic representation and fleshy mutation. The underlying assumption in all four is a conception of art as that which challenges and inspires us to think imaginatively and critically about the philosophical, social, and ethical ramifications raised by bodily transformation. They all opine that art provides the space within which flesh, in its mutant shapes (the result of fantasy, illness, or scientific experimentation), is re-coded and turned into a tool for cultural critique. At the same time, they all argue for the power of hybrid flesh to revise aesthetic codes in instigating the production of alternative artistic techniques, forms, and purposes. In “Chuck Palahniuk and the Violence of Beauty,” Elisabeth Bronfen’s analysis of classic pinups levels a potent critique at modernity and postmodernity’s obsession with beauty. For Bronfen, the pinup serves the function of warding off corporeal change. In foregrounding the artificiality of the feminine body, it offers the representation of wholeness—in direct contrast to bodily experience—at the same time that it displays the perfect body as a pure surface defying all signs of mutability. The artistic work of performance artists Hannah Wilke, Cindy Sherman, and Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Invisible Monsters bring the human body back into play with real and symbolic mutability. By means of making what is meant to be invisible visible, namely, the “monstrous” body, they illumine flesh as abject. Through narratives and performances woven around disfigurement and death-inducing bodily sculpting, all three artists deconstruct the logic of the pinup to reveal indifference and blindness as the vanishing point of our cultural obsession with attention and beauty. Christina Dokou keeps the discussion of artistic intervention into the politics of fleshy mutation in the domain of popular culture. In “Fantastic

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4body-ings: Ideal Grotesqueness in the Comic-book Culture,” she examines how the comic book questions the purity of its superheroic model and, in so doing, casts a shadow over the Western obsession with the improvement of the body through technoscience. Her interest is primarily focused on the America-based comic The Fantastic Four, and their overstretched bodies, which lose their human shape and structure. In her argument the distortion of the classical heroic form (for example Superman’s), the pumping and twisting of the body, liberates readers and viewers from the tyranny of classicalform concepts and their bioscientific aids. The “malformed heroic” proves, in effect, that techno-evolution actually causes the human body to regress, since by transferring skill, dexterity, and importance to the biomedical aids, the original flesh loses its usefulness, becoming an ungainly thing in contrast to its sleek and superfast accoutrements. Katve-Kaisa Kontturi’s “Eye, Agency, and Bodily Becomings: Processing Breast Cancer in and through Images” focuses on what is considered culturally monstrous, namely, the body in pain, the body dying. The Finnish artist and sculptor Helena Hietanen photographs her own cancerous body, recording the stages of its slow, painful transformation toward death. Her decision to exhibit her scars publicly accords her agency in defying the image of the cancerous woman as a passive victim of the deadly disease. By means of representing the literal flesh-sculpting that Hietanen is engaged in through her battle with the disease, photography provides the artistic practice with a language through which bodily mutation reconfigures gender-coded cultural assumptions concerning a woman’s image in death—and in life. Edwina Bartlem’s “Emergence: New Flesh and Life in New Media Art” discusses the emergence of new art forms that rely on the use of digital information and biotechnologies, such as tissue engineering, stem cell research, xenotransplantation, and genomics. Bartlem deals, more specifically, with the work of the Australian artist Patricia Piccinini, the Brazilian-born biological artist Eduardo Kac, and the artists involved in the Tissue Culture and Art Project. What they all share is the engineering of fleshy artefacts, the designing of “semi-living” forms as part of a new artistic practice that aims to initiate social critique within the space of the art gallery. Bartlem argues that, in transferring out of the laboratory the methodologies and the techniques of multibillion scientific research, these artists subvert the intended, or “legitimate,” profit-oriented purpose of recent biotechnologies. They engage with debates about artificially created life-forms, animal testing, and the possible futures biomedical research might lead to. What is of importance in Bartlem’s argument is that the artistic engineering of flesh not only forges a new posthumanist aesthetics but also brings about a redefinition of life itself, with all the ethical dilemmas and responsibilities that this re-coding entails. Part III: Posthuman Enfleshments In the final part of the book, the focus shifts onto the relationship between body and technology, more specifically, onto the ways in which the notion

12


of bodily self or embodied subjectivity is being redefined in light of recent advances in biomedical and information sciences. The essays in this section attempt to raise questions regarding the transgressive potential and limits of posthuman, hybrid enfleshment. At the same time they also articulate and challenge the mind/body dualism along with other essentialist discourses in Western metaphysical thought. For example, in Nicola Rehling’s essay, “Fleshing Out Virtual Bodies: White Heterosexual Masculinity in Contemporary Cyberfantasy Cinema,” the relationship between white masculinity and the representation of virtual bodies in popular cinema (Matrix and Strange Days) is seen through the lenses of the gendered mind/body hierarchy and Christianity’s concept of disembodiment and the privileging of the spirit over the flesh. However, the disembodiment of digital and virtual culture, which is often seen to challenge such binarisms, equates, according to the author, the inscription of white masculinity as noncorporeality with the white male anxiety over the lack of a specific identity. As Rheling argues in her essay, popular cinematic fantasies about virtual bodies rarely screen such fluid conceptions of identity and tend to secure not merely an ontological separation of the human and the technological but also the terms of sexual and racial difference. Domna Pastourmatzi, in her essay, “Flesh Encounters Biotechnology: Speculations on the Future of the Biological Machine,” also raises questions regarding the relationship between the human body and contemporary technoscience in her discussion of Lethe (1997) by the American author Walter Jon Williams, and The Extra (1990) by the Australian Greg Egan. As she argues, technoscience assumes that the flesh-and-blood human being is nothing more than a composite of various coded systems and a mere assemblage of biological limbs and organs, a view that reduces the human body to the sum of its parts and promotes a utilitarian approach. By the same logic, biotechnology defines the brain as a complex network whose coded bits of data are transferable into computers and communication systems. The main argument of Pastourmatzi revolves around the notion of the body as a coded text and biology as a “kind of cartography.” She points out that the textualization of the body comes as a reassertion of logocentrism and the body/ mind dichotomy and eventually leads to the commodification of the body itself. Pastourmatzi remains skeptical about the prospect of successfully separating the core of human consciousness from the flesh. Linda Williams’ essay, “Modernity and the Other Body: The Human Contract with Mute Animality,” is based on the premise that while a general history and theory of disembodiment is crucial to an understanding of the human in the formation of modernity, it is also a history that cannot be understood in isolation from the ontological status of the animal body. Her essay investigates the significance of this “other body,” the animal body, which, as Williams seeks to demonstrate, plays a significant, though unacknowledged, role in the production of modern concepts and techniques of embodiment. Starting with an analysis of the emergence of comparative anatomy, she attempts to explore through her own skepticism the ways in

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which the distinction between human and animal bodies is still evident in twenty-first-century cultural and technological concepts of corporeality. Finally, in Rosi Braidotti’s essay, “Meta(l)flesh,” the relationship between body and technology is seen as both exhilarating and painful to the collective anthropocentric hubris that thinkers have inherited from centuries of Western humanism. By emphasizing the notion of transformative changes, mutations, and metamorphoses, she argues for the parallels and resonances between the sexualized (male and female) bodies and the machine or technological other. It is crucial, she argues, to invent conceptual schemes that would allow us to think about the unity and the interdependence of the human and its historical “others” at the very point in time when these others return to dislocate the foundations of the humanistic worldview. In this essay, Braidotti seeks to reset the question of technology in the framework of the challenge of change or transformation, which she sees as central to both mapping the present and working toward a constructive future.

Notes 1. Nettleton and Watson 2. 2. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept, for example, of a “Body without Organs,” that is, “a full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata” (153), allows them to speak of the body as an ever-moving, ceaselessly transformable assemblage that escapes any notion of fixity or system of unity. A large part of feminist theory also (Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, Ros Diprose, or Iris Marion Young, to name but a few), largely related with postmodernist feminism and based on the assumption that women’s biological functions subject their bodies to perpetual transformation, define embodiment as “a differential and fluid construct, the site of potential, rather than as a fixed given,” as Margrit Shildrick and Janet Price have put it (3). 3. Featherstone 3. 4. Birke 154. 5. Moi; Weedon. 6. Hamacher and Wellbery 11. 7. Welton 255. 8. Ibid. 255. 9. Flesh is defined as a natural resource that can be used, abused, and discarded. As Andrews and Nelkin explain, “body parts are extracted like a mineral, harvested like a crop, or mined like a resource. Tissue is procured—a term more commonly used for land, goods and prostitutes” (5, emphasis in the original). 10. This is evident in cases where, as Edwina Bartlem argues in this volume, the human body acquires organs or skin transplanted from engineered donor animals or ears grown on the back of a specially bred mouse, the cyborg body with pacemaker or artificial hip, and so on. See also Andrews and Nelkin; Kimbrell. 11. In science fiction, the notion of the human body as genetic data bank validates its postmodern conceptualization as a decipherable mechanism and endorses its manipulation and expendability. However, in her essay, Domna Pastourmatzi argues against the reductionist equation of the human organism with a DNA pattern that can be dismantled and reconstructed. As she points out, such a view

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12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

D i a m a n t i, K i t s i-M i t a kou, Yi a n nop ou l ou “obscures the genetic, cellular, organic and environmental complexities of life.” From a different perspective, Rosi Braidotti also argues that the body is a more complex entity; it is “a bundle of contradictions . . . a zoological entity; a genetic data-bank, while it also remains a bio-social entity, that is to say a slab of codified, personalized memories.” As N. Katherine Hayles explains, “the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life” (2). Gibson 16. Plant 59. Cresswell 20. Ibid. 9. Drawing on the work of Liisa Malkki, Tim Cresswell identifies “sedentarist metaphysics” as the tendency of the modern world to locate people and identities in particular spaces and to think of mobile people in negative terms. In his view, the modern sedentarist metaphysics has been replaced in the postmodern age and theory by a “nomadic metaphysics” which valorizes the mobile over the fixed and promotes a world in constant motion (16–17). Grosz 1999, 16. Ibid. 17.

Bibliography Ahmed, Sara and Jackie Stacey, eds. Thinking Through the Skin. London: Routledge, 2001. Andrews, Lori and Dorothy Nelkin. Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age. New York: Crown, 2001. Atkinson, Tiffany, ed. The Body. Readers in Cultural Criticism Series. General editor: Katherine Belsey. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Birke, Linda. Feminism and the Biological Body. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. Connor, Stephen. The Book of Skin. London: Reaktion Books, 2004. Cresswell, Tim. “The Production of Mobilities.” New Formations 43 (2001): 11–25. Deleuze, Giles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2003. Diprose, Rosalyn. The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference. London: Routledge, 1994. Evans, Mary and Ellie Lee, eds. Real Bodies: A Sociological Introduction. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Featherstone, Mike, ed. Body Modification. London: Sage, 2000. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994. ———. Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of the Body. New York: Routledge, 1995. ———. “Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought.” In Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, edited by Elizabeth Grosz, 15–28. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999.

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Hamacher, Werner and David E. Wellbery, eds. “Introduction.” In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, by Giorgio Agamben. Translated by Daniel HellerRoazen. 1–12. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Holliday, Ruth and John Hassard, eds. Contested Bodies. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. ———. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Kimbrell, Andrew. The Human Body Shop: The Cloning, Engineering, and Marketing of Life. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1997. Kirby, Vicky. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon C. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Martin, Emily. Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Days of Aids. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics. London: Methuen, 1985. Nettleton, Sarah and Jonathan Watson, eds. The Body in Everyday Life. London and New York, 1998. Pinter, Harold. “Art, Truth and Politics.” Nobel Lecture 2005. http://nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html. THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2005. Plant, Sadie. “The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics.” In Cyberspace/ Cyberbodies/ Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, 45–64. London: Sage, 1995. Price, Janet and Margrit Shildrick, eds. Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Segal, Naomi, Lib Taylor, and Roger Cook, eds. Indeterminate Bodies. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Shildrick, Margrit. Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio) ethics. London: Routledge, 1997. Weedon, Chris. Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. London: Blackwell, 1987. Welton, Donn. “Biblical Bodies.” In Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, edited by Donn Welton, 229–258. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.


Pa r t I

Disi n t egr at i ng Bodi es


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Th e Pa st of Fl esh: Morta l a n d I m morta l Bodi es i n A nc i e n t Gr e e k Poe t ry Ekaterini Douka-Kabitoglou

The Epic Body Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilleus, son of Peleus, the accursed anger which brought uncounted anguish on the Achaians and hurled down to Hades many mighty souls of heroes, making their bodies the prey to dogs and the birds’ feasting: and this was the working of Zeus’ will. Sing from the time of the first quarrel which divided Atreus’ son, the lord of men, and godlike Achilleus.1

In the proem of the Iliad, Homer asks the goddess-Muse to celebrate a

certain event, the rage of Achilles, giving us also a summary of the story to follow. It is a kind of lyrical introduction at the opening of the epic poem that “will explore the relations between man, beast, and god; it will be a story of suffering and death, and will go beyond this to tell of the ultimate fate of the dead.”2 So, it is not accidental that the violation and disgrace of the human body, which becomes a prey to animals, sullies and deconstructs the heroic ideal of the “beautiful death” that is praised in the Iliad. The Homeric male body, as a body in distress, is the locus of the cut, the blow, the wound. Bodies are molested, traversed by spears, dragged on the ground, disfigured, mutilated, and murdered. The body’s dismemberment, with its limbs scattered here and there, culminates in the dreadful act of the human flesh being victimized by a joint plot of the superhuman and subhuman forces, mentioned in the proem of the Iliad and running through the whole epic poem until the last verse, as a nightmarish horror. Indeed, the very iconography of the poem seems to invoke the specter of violence and disintegration, focusing on the horrible body torn to bits, the mutilated body of man as a disfigured corpse that haunts the entire epic tradition. Ontologically speaking, though, the souls of the dead heroes that descend to Hades leave behind not corpses but young soldiers who retain their

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E k at e r i n i D ou k a-K a bi t o g l ou

“maleness,” that is, their human identity, since for Homer the dualism of body and soul has not yet been discovered or invented. A detailed account of this view informs us that: “If man lives and thinks in a way that allows no meaning to terms like flesh and spirit or body and mind, it follows that death must somehow make sense in terms of that same conception of human unity. This is already suggested in the proem passage, where the things abandoned by the psychai [souls] are not corpses or bodies but the men themselves, aftoi”; given that “When Homeric man dies he is not divided into two parts,” the question arises: “what, then, is this other thing that leaves him at the moment of death?” The explanation given is that, “The psyche exhaled at death is an empty gasp of air, lost and invisible once it is breathed out, but in Hades the psyche is a shade or phantom or image, eidolon, of the man which resembles him in appearance but lacks his substance.”3 It is quite clear that the Homeric man, while alive, is a physical substance, and the term “soul” is used for the last breath that abandons the dying body. According to Vernant, in Homer soma means just a lifeless body; on the contrary, a living body is seen as a system of nonintegrated organs and limbs, “a locus for the meeting, and occasional conflict, of impulses or competing forces”; it is death that transforms this living complex into a static entity, granting it a “formal unity” in objectifying it: “Above all, it is an object of contemplation, a visual spectacle, and therefore a focus for care, mourning, and funeral rites.”4 Examining the words that Homer employed to speak of the body and the intellect, Snell informs us that “Aristarchus was the first to notice that in Homer the word soma which subsequently came to mean ‘body’ is never used with reference to a living being; soma is the corpse.” Snell quotes Aristarchus’ opinion that demas was the term used for the Homeric live body, adding that Homer has “some further expressions at his disposal to designate the thing which is called ‘body’ by us, and soma by fifth century Greeks.”5 It is also interesting to note the phonetic kinship of the word soma (corpse) to that of sema (place of burial, mound), later to develop the meaning of “sign.” In epic poetry, a “glorious death,” occurring at the acme of the warrior’s life, immortalizes the moment of youth and, in a paradoxical way, it is the dead body that perpetuates the strength, vigor, and energy of virtue. While alive, the beauty and “grace” of the warrior’s young body are mainly portrayed through the gleam of the armor he wears and the arms he carries. The heroic body has a strong physical presence6 and elemental vitality, especially in scenes of battle and massacre where the terrifying radiance of the warrior engaged in chivalrous combat reaches a climax that combines bestiality and divinity. Yet, the multiplicity of terms referring to parts and organs of the body, and to what today we would call mental functions (sensations and feelings), does not undermine the Homeric unity of human existence as an indivisible whole in action. As Clarke contends, “The implication of all this is that Homer does not oppose mental life to the life of the body but takes them as an undifferentiated whole. There is no ‘ghost in the machine,’ ” because Homeric man does not have a separate mind; rather “his thought

Th e Pa s t of F l e s h

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and consciousness are as inseparable a part of his bodily life as are movement and metabolism,” which makes a human being a mass of blood, bones, brain, and brilliance.7 So speaking he drew the sharp sword that hung long and heavy at his side, gathered himself, and swooped like a high-flying eagle which darts down to the plain through the dark clouds to snatch up a baby lamb or cowering hare. So Hektor swooped to attack, flourishing his sharp sword. And Achilleus charged against him, his heart filled with savage fury. In front of his chest he held the covering of his lovely decorated shield, and the bright four-bossed helmet nodded on his head, with the powerful golden hairs that Hephaistos had set thick along the crest shimmering round it. Like the Evening Star on its path among the stars in the darkness of the night, the loveliest star set in the sky, such was the light gleaming from the point of the sharp spear Achilleus held quivering in his right hand, as he purposed death for godlike Hektor, looking over his fine body to find the most vulnerable place. All the rest of his body was covered by his bronze armour, the fine armour he had stripped from mighty Patroklos when he killed him. But flesh showed where the collarbones hold the join of neck and shoulders, at the gullet, where a man’s life is most quickly destroyed. Godlike Achilleus drove in there with his spear as Hektor charged him, and the point went right through his soft neck: but the ash spear with its weight of bronze did not cut the windpipe, so that Hektor could still speak and answer Achilleus. He crashed in the dust, and godlike Achilleus triumphed over him: “Hektor, doubtless as you killed Patroklos you thought you would be safe, and you had no fear of me, as I was far away. You fool—behind him there was I left to avenge him, a far greater man than he, waiting there by the hollow ships, and I have collapsed your strength. Now the dogs and birds will maul you hideously, while the Achaians will give Patroklos full burial.”8

The actual abuses that Achilles inflicts on Hector’s corpse, and the nightmarish horrors of the body’s defilement surrendered to the voracity of beasts, as envisioned later by Priam, form part of a war ritual parallel to the natural laws where the predator attacks and devours its prey. The “cannibalistic” act, meant to dehumanize the enemy, is here performed through the mediation of dogs and birds, which deprive the dead body of its proper rituals—consummation by fire and celebration through song. If a “good” death is preferable to a mediocre life, then the disfigurement of the enemy’s corpse is not just an act of irrational cruelty but of intentional utmost punishment. The body devoured raw is denied the purification of burning that restores it to wholeness and permits its transition through the gates of Hades to the underworld. Bodily disfigurement signifies the warrior’s fall from the human condition into the monstrosity of categorial non-differentiation and ontological annihilation. The body’s story of heroism and glory, but also of suffering and death, ultimately explores the uncertain human position between the animalistic and the divine. In the Iliad, where the communication between men and gods is open and immediate,9 to the extent that human moves and decisions are directly affected by divine interventions, consciousness is a fusion of the mortal and

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immortal element. In his very interesting study exploring the “origin” of consciousness in Western culture, Julian Jaynes asks the (almost rhetorical) question: “If there is no subjective consciousness, no mind, soul, or will, in Iliadic men, what then initiates behavior?” to give the beguiling answer that, in fact, “the gods take the place of consciousness.”10 From another perspective, the ancient Greek allegiance to the body is expressed through the “corporeality” of the divine, the “anthropomorphism” of the gods who incarnate all bodily characteristics in a transcendental exaltation. “Would the Greeks, in representing the gods to themselves, really have attributed to them the form of corporeal existence that is proper to all perishable creatures here on earth?” Vernant begins his inquiry in his revealing study Mortals and Immortals, stressing the paradox that for the Greeks the supernatural was conceived in purely “natural” terms. Attempting to approach the problem from the opposite angle in a body-centered research, he embarks on a hermeneutics of the body as experienced in Greek culture—“what did the body mean to the Greeks?”—contrasting it to the modern figuration based mainly on the binary opposition of soul/body or spirit/matter.11 The dazzling beauty of the divine immortal bodies, in an everlasting state of glamour and bliss and enjoying a vital and radiant existence, is essentially a deification of the human condition.12 The mortal ephemeral body is constantly in search of perennial beauty and immortal glory through a “beautiful death” that is preferable to an ugly and trivial life. Moreover, meaningful existence emerges from public recognition, so a song of praise celebrating a hero’s death and being engrafted into the collective memory guarantees survival and a permanent “life.” It is precisely because in archaic Greek culture “everyone lives in terms of others, under the eyes and in the esteem of others, where the basis of a personality is confirmed by the extent to which its reputation is known,” that “real death” does not reside in physical extinction but “lies in amnesia, silence, demeaning obscurity, the absence of fame. By contrast, real existence—for the living or the dead—comes from being recognized, valued, and honoured,” Vernant professes; thus the validation of life through honorable death and poetic commemoration introduces a literary “metaphysics” sublimating an individual subject permanently engrafted on “the collective memory of the group; the death that has given his biography its conclusion has also given it permanence.”13 The double role of securing social acceptance and metaphysical endurance is granted to poetry; and if the yearning for a “textual” immortality surprises us, Vernant reminds us of the radical differences that separate Greek culture from ours, the extravert archaic person versus the introvert modern personality and the literary genres that best express them—epic poetry and the novel.14 Consequently, for Homer, it is not death itself that initiates terror, but the disfigurement and laceration of the dead body. The absence of a distinction between body and soul is paralleled by the elimination of a radical break between the natural and the supernatural that, endowing the divinities with human qualities, also reflects on humans the much desired corporeal plenitude of an immortal body.


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The Lyric Female Body In his influential study of the first poetic and philosophical productions of Greek culture, Fränkel notes that the early Greek period, extending from Homer to mid-fifth century, forms a self-sufficient and independent cultural system that “brought to maturity many high values, which perished with it because classical Greece could no longer cope with them”; he emphasizes sequence but also radical change, asserting that the historical distance from Homer to Pindar is marked both by continuity and discontinuity, because immediately after Homer “there follows so sharp a break that we are compelled to divide the early Greek period into two ages, the ‘epic’ and the ‘archaic.’ ”15 In the lyrical poetry of Sappho, the most celebrated voice of the archaic period, we have the first intimations of a subjectivity that “has” a body rather than “being” a body. According to Du Bois, “Sappho and the poets who are her near contemporaries are among the first to inhabit fully the first person singular, to use the word ‘I’ to anchor their poetic speech,” introducing an individual subject.16 Although the emergence of the “soul,” in a religious and philosophical form, has still to wait for the Pythagorean and Orphic traditions as well as the Platonic Dialogues, Sappho explores this new psychosomatic geography of the personal ego in order to exalt the erotic female body in complete harmony with nature. The fragments of her poetry introduce us to a hedonistic physical world, to gardens and groves with cool waters and fresh breezes, to human festivities and celebrations, a narrative aesthetics of embodiment where meaning and truth are made carnal. What characterizes Sapphic poetry is the joy of immediate bodily sensation:17 flowers, wreaths, garlands, fragrances, soft mattresses—what fascinates sight, smell, and touch. Clearly the Sapphic female body, diverting from traditional cultural assumptions and practices relating to women, possesses a physicality and affluence that it shares with the rest of the material world. Delight in physical existence is everything to Sappho, and her highest aim is to make that delight perceptible to us. Hither to me from Crete to this holy temple, where is your delightful grove of apple-trees, and altars smoking with incense; therein cold water babbles through apple-branches, and the whole place is shadowed by roses, and from the shimmering leaves the sleep of enchantment comes down; therein too a meadow, where horses graze, blossoms with spring flowers, and the winds blow gently . . .; there, Cypris, take . . . and pour gracefully into golden cups nectar that is mingled with our festivities.18

The fact that satisfaction seems to come largely from the subject’s own body allows us to speak of it as “autoerotic.” The body not only touches but caresses, not only hears but listens, it consists not only of eyes and ears but also hands and feet whose sheer motion delights. . . . and I will lay down my limbs on soft cushions.19

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Poetry attempts to catch the desire for love and its internal connection to the body at its very inception, discovering a rich interplay between sensation, affectivity, and cognition.20 The flesh, wild and active, makes its own demands, and the songs are full of the pleasure of corporeal involvement. You came, and I was longing for you; you cooled my heart which was burning with desire.21

Sappho is the first poet to have called love “bittersweet”22 in order to express the feelings of delight and distress that characterize the erotic experience. This bold neologism attempts to define a new sensuous and psychic reality, and inscribes the tension and agony of the coexistence of oppositional experiences that shatter and frighten this “new” subject, constructed by lyrical poetry. Once again limb-loosening Love makes me tremble, the bitter-sweet, irresistible creature.23

In one of her best-known poems, Fr. 31, addressed to a young girl with a sweet voice and enchanting laughter that arouses desire in the female speaker, 24 Sappho gives us an almost clinical report in order to present the psychopathology of the erotic/ecstatic condition. She very delicately and artistically balances between the “semioticization” of the body and the “somatization” of language. What is represented is not only the desired object but even more the desiring flesh. It is as if a window opens to view a stream of consciousness—perhaps new in the world—of the body as a unity of organs on the verge of dismemberment, and a self looking inside amazed at its own vulnerability. The poem begins with a description of externality— vision (“the man who sits”) and sound (“voice” and “laughter”)—to slide imperceptibly into the interiority of a self, individual subjectivity, with a silent, private consciousness already captured in the realm of the undecidable, of “appearance” and “reality,” of fictionality—as the double use of the verb “seems” suggests. Body and soul may still be undifferentiated, but intensity and “tension” are already present, as the observing mind can detach itself from the pangs and torment of love, eager to “interpret” and ready to “sublimate”—that is, approach the body in an “epistemophilic” manner. He seems as fortunate as the gods to me, the man who sits opposite you and listens nearby to your sweet voice and lovely laughter. Truly that sets my heart trembling in my breast. For when I look at you for a moment, then it is no longer possible for me to speak; my tongue has snapped, at once a subtle fire has stolen beneath my flesh, I see nothing with my eyes, my ears hum, sweat pours from me, a trembling seizes me all over, I am greener than grass, and it seems to me that I am little short of dying. But all can be endured, since . . . even a poor man . . . 25

By placing the man and woman in physical opposition, Sappho confirms the thesis, expressed by Du Bois, that the Greeks “see the sexes as profoundly


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different according to a more elaborate logic than our own. Each has what the other has not”; yet, simultaneously, the poet totally subverts the standard goal of the Greek male, which is “to dominate the female and her body, to control its potentiality, to subdue it to his interests,” since the “fear of women’s bodies comes not from its woundedness but from its power to wound.”26 Sappho’s female body-in-pieces articulates an imaginary fragmentation. Its fantasized disintegration only vaguely echoes the Homeric dismemberment, familiar to her and her audience from traditional poetry. The “limb-loosening” Eros here plays the role of heroic Ares (is the etymological similarity accidental?) perhaps relating Sappho’s physical distress to the earlier Homeric sense of the mutilated body. It is the newly discovered (or invented) structure of desire that transforms the sensuous into the pathetic body, with the object desired by the flesh being itself flesh—present, yet already distant. Erotic “death” is ultimately avoided through the transmutation of experience into language, the transformation of a body in distress into a poetic text of pleasure and delight. The unique irony of this situation proves that it is the mortal woman in love, exposed to the extremities of erotic passion and facing deadly dangers in the realm of the uncanny, who approaches the divine condition in order to transcribe it—and not the man who “seems” equal to the gods. The poem itself bears witness to the liberation from the mania of erotic possession, as the “burning Sappho” transubstantiates eros into logos, immortalizing not the dead masculine body, as Homer does, but the fully alert feminine flesh. The female body, though, will have to wait for centuries before it can again articulate its desires directly and openly, as Sappho does, through a woman speaker rather than being misrepresented in images of women constructed by men. Examining the problem of the “historicity” of the body, Du Bois reads this poem as a Sapphic/lyric version of both the epic mutilation and the dramatic sparagmos (dismemberment). More specifically, she explores the Sapphic indebtedness to Homer, setting the whole scene in an archaic cultural context but also in a postmodern theoretical framework: “Sappho’s disordered, fragmented body takes on a different resonance than if it were to be understood only as figuring the Lacanian imaginary. The subject, the ‘I’ of archaic lyric, is generated in the earliest urban, that is, literally ‘political’ setting, internal to the voice of a dominant aristocracy”; thus, Du Bois argues, a female voice inaugurates “the male citizen of the ancient polis, the city-state,” operating as a bridge between the epic and the dramatic genres; the specific poem “recalls the relatively archaic view of the body represented for her in Homeric poetry” and her view of eros as lysimeles, disuniting “the only recently constituted body, suggests that eros returns that body to a past state, to an alliance of functions, a loose set of organic capacities”; Sappho’s retrogressive movement is “a turning back from a tenuously held subjectivity, that new sense of the poet as an ‘I,’ back to an archaic sense of identity.”27 The new model of the body that emerges in the historical polis 28 is, of course, the “body politic,” inaugurating a community of free subjects that causes

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the town to act in one body, but also a deadly conflict between the individual and the communal “body” resulting in the tragedy of “sacrifice,” a “sacrifice of what is different from those who people the town; and this difference allows a town to be recognized as one body.”29

The Lyric Male Body The Greek creation of the polis figures “a public world that was overwhelmingly male,” hence the one-sex aesthetic model “displayed what was already massively evident in culture more generally: man is the measure of all things.”30 This conception of masculinity has found its expression not solely in the statues of classical art, 31 where it is clearly the naked male body that is the object of representation. Its presence is also strongly felt in archaic lyric poetry through the aesthetic and ethical ideal of “beauty and virtue,” as it was lived in the Panhellenic athletic games and recorded in the epinician odes of Pindar, expressing the ethical and aesthetic ideal of kalokagathia. The ritual dimension of the games combines the experience of initiation with that of survival, transforming the epic heroic prototype of conquest/death to the lyrical symbolic pattern of victory/defeat, thus idolizing the winner without demanding necessarily the bodily extinction of his opponent. The victory that follows the ordeal of competition consecrates the winning athlete and elevates him to the status of the godlike. What illuminates the male body in triumph is divine grace, the dazzle and radiance of man in the supreme moment of his glorification. As athletic exercises have contributed to the valorization of the body, the celebration of the ideal human figure as essentially nude characterizes the Greek experience of nakedness not as a matter of shame or dishonor but of consecration. Pindar is the poet who has mostly praised the triumphant athletic body. His famous ode, Olympian I, sings a hymn to Hieron of Syracuse, winner of the horse race. Although it is a hymn to a particular winner in an athletic contest, the victory ode has a strong religious element and its ceremonial performance, sung as a choral lyric in the joyous procession of friends that welcomed the hero home, was closely connected with worship of a god. Referring to Hieron’s great-grandfather Pelops, founder of the Olympic Games,32 Pindar narrates two versions of the myth of Pelops, which throw a dark shadow on the blissful exaltation of the celebratory moment, by introducing notions of cannibalism and rape, that is, violation of the human flesh—in this case by the divine. The myth of Pelops represents a hideous event of laceration and dismemberment of the human body that ends in a cannibalistic act of the gods. The story of the mutilation of Pelops by Tantalos, and the alternative version of Pelops’ abduction and rape by the god Poseidon, gives two different aspects of violent humiliation and destruction of the body that subvert the image of its glorification and expose the frailty of the human flesh in its “hybristic” attempt to become immortal.


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ant. 2 .... But when you were thus vanished with no sign, And the wide search of men had brought you not Back to your mother, then quickly was heard Some secret voice of envious neighbours, telling That for the seething cauldron’s fiery heat Your limbs with a knife’s blade Were cut asunder, And at each table, portioned to the guests, The morsels of your flesh became their meal. ep. 2 Senseless, I hold it, for a man to say The gods eat mortal flesh. I spurn the thought. A slanderer’s evil tongue Often enough brings him to no good end.

What is of interest is that the ivory shoulder of Pelops (replacing the fleshy one devoured by goddess Demeter) was one of the sacred relics decorating ancient Olympia. The heroes of the epic past are revived through the victorious athletes of the archaic choral lyric, embraced triumphant into the community of the polis. Yet, a crucial difference between Homeric epic and Pindaric lyric lies in the collective and formalized character of both “actor” and “audience”; the ode “preserves the ritual ideology of ordeal through competition, and it even presents itself as the final stage in the ritual process, where the victorious athlete is reintegrated into his community,” with the basic difference that this community “is no longer the family or tribe but the polis, and it is the polis that the chorus of the epinician ode ostensibly represents.”33 Also, “Pindar replaced the first person by the impersonal ‘one’ of society; the transitory and the unique were to him no more than illustrations of the universal and eternal.”34 In the lyric ode is depicted a convergence of the religious and the political, a harmony between art and empirical life that unites world and individual in a moment of aesthetic sublimity. It is in the tragic ode (tragodia, tragedy) where the individual hero and the collective chorus are “tragically” divided. The contests have the character of both spectacle and religious festival, with the viewers watching the agon, sublimation of the heroic chivalrous combat, as if participating in a sacred ceremony. ant. 4 .... And well I know that of all living men No host, both of more heart for noble ends And more power to achieve them, shall by me Be enriched in glorious harmonies of song. ....

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Not only the care but the brilliance of the god falls on the athlete, an ephemeral creature, illuminating him with the splendor that always clothes the divine body, thus making him worthy of immortality and undying glory. For a moment, the human imagination has materialized its dream of stealing the “fire” of the gods, a body of vital energy and dynamism shining in triumphant joy. Grace, charis, radiates in the image of the victor reflected in the song that perpetuates the momentary divination of the mortal body. Human logos has the immortalizing power of transforming flesh into word—“and the flesh was made word.” Although Pindar’s poetry remains attached to the heroic ideal and reproduces institutions and themes originally introduced by Homer, it seems to receive, even though imperceptibly, the influence of politico-religious currents that overwhelm his own time—the Dionysian cult and Orphic mystical doctrines that, from the seventh century onward, challenged the official religion of the Olympian pantheon and introduced practices connected to a “meta-physical” side of human nature. Clarke’s comment, “it turns out that in surviving Greek the earliest unmistakable statements that the human body contains a soul are made by Pindar, in passages which almost certainly betray the influence of Orphic teaching or some kindred body of doctrine,” is characteristic.35 The Pindaric concept of psyche introduces the most explicit enunciation of the dichotomy between body and soul, “which is in sharp contrast with the undifferentiated unity of Homeric man in life and death,” Clarke argues, explaining that when new terms indicating “body” and “spirit” appear simultaneously in a variety of texts, they are indicative of a cultural revolution introducing “a dichotomy between inner self and outer flesh”; yet, the linguistic evidence supports the view that the new concept of “soul” is not a sudden emergence but a product of a long evolution, because “there is evidence from the usage of psyche among the Archaic poets before Pindar” to show the interaction between rhetorical and theoretical innovations; so, both poetry and religion “bear witness in their different ways to a deeper cultural movement.”36 The deified body of the winning athlete has already created a space to offer hospitality to the emerging immortal “soul,” the aionion eidolon (perennial phantasm), the spiritual core that survives bodily death because it is “the part that comes from the gods.” In Olympian II Pindar, following the Pythagorean theory of the next world, mentions the names of heroes who have succeeded in winning the reward of eternal life, introducing the notion of metempsychosis; also, in Pythian III, although he seems reserved about human metaphysical longings and afterlife expectations—“Pray for no life immortal, soul of mine, / But draw in full depth on the skills of which / You can be master” (ep. 3)—the whole frame of his thinking presupposes the doctrine of the soul’s immortality. The philosophical dualism of body and soul, matter and spirit, officially introduced by Plato37 in the fourth century and establishing an unchallenged domination throughout Western philosophy and religion, is already present. “But it is with Plato that the inversion of the values attributed to the body and soul is finally completed,” Vernant affirms; instead of accepting the


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“reality” of the living body of which the psyche 38 is an eidolon, its phantom, it is now psyche (essential and immortal as against a “shadowy” body) that constitutes one’s real being. So there is a radical change in the status of the living body: “it now becomes a simple appearance, an illusory, insubstantial, fugitive, and transitory image of what we ourselves truly and always are. In the ghostly world of appearances, the body is ‘that which is made to look like the semblance of the soul.’ ”39 The word soma (meaning “corpse” for Homer) acquires its modern sense. Concepts of the body and soul40 were firmly fixed in Greek culture by the late fifth and fourth centuries, but it seems that in the realm of poetry the earliest unmistakable statements that the human body contains a soul were made by Pindar, in passages that almost certainly betray the influence of Orphic teaching or some similar type of doctrine. Vernant specifies the Greek contribution to the “objectification” of the body through religious practices, concluding that “the affirmation of the presence of a noncorporeal element within us, which is related to the divine and which is also ‘our selves,’ marks more than just a turning point in Greek culture: it marks a kind of rupture.”41

The Dramatic Body The myth of the new god Dionysus and the Orphic mysteries that accompanied it totally digress from the unitary conception of the Homeric man. According to Detienne, “All the speculative thought of the Orphic disciples, with its cosmogonies, theogonies, and anthropomorphic preoccupations, develops in opposition to the dominant thought of the politico-religious world, in opposition to the officialized parlance of Hesiod and Homer.”42 Instead of pursuing the deification of the human body by projecting it on divine anthropomorphism, and its immortality through the collective memory of its feats through poetry, these new esoteric doctrines introduce a godly (and immortal) part, called psyche (soul), in the body, which is thus degraded to “dust,” the fallen and inferior term of the binary opposition and extreme polarization of matter/spirit. From then on the human body has suffered centuries of systematic misrepresentation in the history of Western metaphysics. Patrizia Magli reminds us that as early as Aristotle, “the soul is ‘figure’ and ‘form.’ The body is ‘matter.’ ”43 By being “objectified,” that is, reduced entirely to matter, the body gradually acquired the status of a scientific object defined by physiological terms only.44 The Orphic description of Dionysus’ death constitutes, as is well known, the origin of tragic ritual and tragedy as a poetic genre. The tragic political space of ancient Greece, concentrating on the event of “sacrifice,” the struggle between an individual history and cosmic fate, offers a compelling and recurrent example of the martyrdom of flesh, of a body in which the drama of divine fragmentation (instead of divine wholeness) is reenacted. In Zeitlin’s opinion, “Suffering and death, of course, are the usual circumstances in tragedy for spotlighting the corporeal status of the self ”; this is especially true in the treatment the dead body receives, yet, Zeitlin argues, focusing

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her assessment on the plays’ endings, these dramas of physical embodiment do not terminate in “closure” but in a form of “opening,” as they “continually move toward some transcendence of these brute corporeal facts of human existence and the literal (and temporal) boundedness of the self.”45 In the seventh century BC the foreign god Dionysus, an ambiguous figure of disruption and confusion, came down from his native land of Asia and Thrace to make a triumphal progress through the whole Greek world, challenging older religious traditions. Being less the god of wine (as we figure him today) and more the god of ecstatic delight, of irrationality and madness, combining animalism and spirituality, he engulfed both religion and art, especially in the city of Athens. The myth narrates the death, mutilation, and devouring of the flesh of child-Dionysus by the Titans, and their consequent extermination by Zeus’ thunder, which turned them into dust, out of which the human race was created. So each human being carries a divine morsel within, the soul, coming from Dionysus. The immortal yet tortured Dionysian body, in contrast to the Olympic ideal of Apollonian wholeness and beauty, portrays an inverted relationship, reflecting (in myth as well as stage) the vulnerable, tortured, disseminated, mortal body of man. Thus, tragedy incarnates the body’s horrific adventure, reaching utter annihilation through extremities of exultation and mourning that represent the Dionysian passion: a simultaneous experience of distress and delight. With the theater itself demanding attention to the body on stage in the person of the actor, the audience of tragic drama, the theoroi participating as it were in a mimesis of sacrifice,46 symbolically share in the sacred grotesque body of the protagonist who incarnates the lacerated god. In the Dionysian ritual, the primordial pain of the individual’s fragmentation from universal unity (the isolated, alienated soul) is coupled with the desire for return to oneness through the body’s orgiastic mania, that is, a frenzied enthusiasm and hedonism immersing the individual ego in the abyss of being. This is the way the Chorus in Euripides’ Bacchae simultaneously rejoices and agonizes over the human reaction to the divine demand for total surrender of self. CHORUS: [Strophe] O for long nights of worship, gay With the pale gleam of dancing feet, With head tossed high to the dewy air— Pleasure mysterious and sweet! O for the joy of a fawn at play In the fragrant meadow’s green delight, Who has leapt out free from the woven snare, Away from the terror of chase and flight, And the huntsman’s shout, and the straining pack, And skims the sand by the river’s brim With the speed of wind in each aching limb, To the blessed lonely forest where The soil’s unmarked by a human track,


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And leaves hang thick and the shades are dim. .... [Antistrophe] Slow, yet unfailing, move the Powers Of heaven with the moving hours. When mind runs mad, dishonours God, And worships self and senseless pride, Then Law eternal wields the rod. Still Heaven hunts down the impious man, Though divine subtlety may hide Time’s creeping foot. No mortal ought To challenge Time—to overbear Custom in act, or age in thought. All men, at little cost, may share The blessing of a pious creed; Truths more than mortal, which began In the beginning, and belong To very nature—these indeed Reign in our world, are fixed and strong.47

The ritualistic origin of tragedy is nowhere traced in a more impressive way than in this last play of Euripides, the Bacchae, a proto-drama of Dionysian passion as incarnated in the “dramatic” human body—that of the protagonist Pentheus—in the presence of the god himself. The somatics of human relations are explored in the play in the most extreme and primitive way, unfolding a regression from order to chaos. It seems that the Dionysian divine, in an unprecedented manner, “embodies” the body’s revenge against its subordination, portraying the sheer physicality of the self and its component parts; the (male) body, having sinned against corporeality, suffers a gradual and relentless degradation from the pride of imposing posture, through stages of transformation, into the ultimate decomposition. Dionysus appears as an ambivalent “androgynous” figure who, through his undefined sexuality, brings about a confusion that results in the abolition and dissolution of social structures and norms violated by the maenadic women who transgress all taboos. Pentheus, in refusing to acknowledge and respect the new god’s absolute power, suffers a ritual sparagmos (laceration) in the hands of the Bacchae, under the leadership of his own mother. “In this primitive regression, women undo the body; its structures cannot hold, its limbs are unbound, and the masculine self, originally so intent on opposing himself to anything feminine, is fragmented and flies apart,” Zeitlin observes, explaining that such female violence cannot only “be viewed through the lens of role reversal,” but within a larger framework characterizing the Greek imagination, where “the maenadic woman is regularly endowed with this power, especially over the masculine body.”48 MESSENGER: .... His mother first, As priestess, led the rite of death, and fell upon him.

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E k at e r i n i D ou k a-K a bi t o g l ou He tore the headband from his hair, that his wretched mother Might recognize him and not kill him. “Mother,” he cried, Touching her cheek, “It is I, your own son Pentheus, whom You bore to Echion. Mother, have mercy; I have sinned, But I am still your own son. Do not take my life!” Agauë was foaming at the mouth; her rolling eyes Were wild; she was not in her right mind, but possessed By Bacchus, and she paid no heed to him. She grasped His left arm between wrist and elbow, set her foot Against his ribs, and tore his arm off by the shoulder. It was no strength of hers that did it, but the god Filled her, and made it easy. On the other side Ino was at him, tearing at his flesh; and now Autonoë joined them, and the whole maniacal horde. A single and continuous yell arose—Pentheus Shrieking as long as life was left in him, the women Howling in triumph. One of them carried off an arm, Another a foot, the boot still laced on it. The ribs Were stripped, clawed clean; and women’s hands, thick red with blood, Were tossing, catching, like a plaything, Pentheus’ flesh. His body lies—no easy task to find—scattered Under hard rocks, or in the green woods.49

The reduction of the body to a formless mass, indistinguishable from the ground on which it lies, totally eliminates the difference between lifeless matter and a living creature. Read from a postmodern theoretical perspective, this archaic dismemberment acquires archetypal and diachronic dimensions: “For the body part, cut off from the totalized body, works to challenge the very structure upon which meaning is based”; according to Lacan, “it is precisely this loss of coherence—this presymbolic chaos—that is figured by the body in bits and pieces. Such a reading brings out the possibility that the tension between body parts and corporeal wholes lies in the very heart of social and symbolic structuration.”50 The hideous death of the tragic hero, with his massacred body having literally returned “to nature,” might have perhaps been avoided if Pentheus, seduced by Dionysus, was not tempted to dress in women’s clothes51 in order to spy on the Bacchae in the performance of their orgiastic rites. This mimesis of femininity impersonated by Pentheus, who thus discovers his bodily or physical part and its primordial ec-static experience, indicates the negative side of the god’s bisexual nature and constitutes a sign of his power to revenge and destroy. The drama that Pentheus lives begins with his masquerade that attempts to appropriate the “other” and ends by incarnating the female body, permeable by affect, helpless, vulnerable, exposed. It is actually dressing as a woman that uncovers to him his corporeal self, forgotten in a life engaged in a masculine contest for supremacy. Through this cross-dressing, the male body uncovers the “feminine” experience of an irrational transport, a bacchant madness that transcends the closed limits of individuality. The end of the play—marking also the historical end of


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tragedy as a poetic genre—commemorates Dionysus as the triumphant lord of the theater and the god of women simultaneously. Zeitlin, in her triple exploration of stage, theme, and gender in drama, nominates Greek tragedy as the topos of “misadventure of the human body” (rather than “adventure”), where the “somatics of the stage” uncover “the body in an unnatural state of pathos (suffering), when it falls away furthest from its ideal of strength and integrity”; the body captivates the audience’s attention in states of helplessness, passivity, disease, madness “undergoing intermittent and spasmodic pain, alternating between spells of dangerous calm and violent storm”; and even after death, tragedy relentlessly exhibits to public view the tormented, lifeless body. Zeitlin’s point that the male body in suffering engages in some form of “flesh” transvestism is both fascinating and terrifying: “at those moments when the male finds himself in a condition of weakness, he too becomes acutely aware that he has a body. Then, at the limits of pain, is when he perceives himself to be most like a woman.”52

Greek and/in Modern Bodies In this roaming through ancient mutations of the body, we have encountered “the flesh made text” in its epic, lyric, and dramatic versions, according to the poetic genres invented by the Greek imaginary, 53 and traced the unstable and multifarious concept of the mind/body binary, or its absence. The heroic body of the male fighter in Homeric epos, perceived as an integrated whole and able to achieve immortality through glorification, reflects the impossibility of the mind/body dichotomy. The idea of an eternal soul existing independently of the body had not yet been born at the time of Homer, as the body of the warrior was capable of being immortalized through posthumous fame or social recognition. The transition toward a subjectivity that has a body is first recorded in Sapphic (and other early lyric) poetry with the introduction of the speaking “I” in her poetic speech, as well as Sappho’s emphasis on the physical, immediate, and sensuous reality. This new psychosomatic geography of the personal ego inserted a tension between matter and mind, which was further enhanced by the transubstantiation of eros into logos. The “thinking” subject/the observing mind not only interpreted the dismembered body in love but also sublimated female flesh through poetry. In a similar manner, in Pindar’s lyric poetry, logos immortalized the body of the athlete. The victorious champion, however, was not a simple revival of the Homeric warrior. Influenced by the Dionysian cult and Orphic mysteries, Pindar imperceptibly introduced the notion of psyche, which enunciated the modern concept of soma. This polarization of matter/spirit invading Greek culture in the persona of Dionysus initiated the genre of tragedy, which expressed it in its most profound and painful form. The extreme objectification and materialization of the body, its irrevocable distancing from the spiritualized psyche, and its subordination to an inferior and decomposing status, on one hand, as well as the body’s desire to return to cosmic oneness through orgiastic mania,

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on the other, demarcates the birth of tragedy as a genre and the death of individual corporeality. Halting for a moment, in search for a theoria of this cultural and linguistic investigation of the archaic “literary” body,54 we realize, of course, that we are always confronted with stories of fantasized bodies but also with the body as a sign of signification. Brooks reminds us that “the project of making the body signify—making it the protagonist of stories and the scene of stories—has not ended and will not end. Even though we acknowledge the meaningless mortality of the body, we continue to celebrate and emblazon the body while we are alive.”55 The cultural significance of the “poetic” body as a symbolic construction, and the way it is “incarnated” in language, reminds us that the body has never been a mere biological entity but signifies our social and political identity. The poetic logos, by (always) presenting the body as a subject of discourse and not an object, and the flesh as a symbolic locus, contributes to a phenomenology of the “lived” body,56 a hermeneutic theory of human existence focused on the corporeal and not the spiritual element; it thus attempts to reverse or deconstruct a transcendental ontotheological binary system of centuries,57 which, in one way or the other, has oppressed and devastated the body. Discussing Nietzsche’s “redemption” of the human body in modern times, Levin confirms that such an attempt cannot be entirely comprehensible “unless we consider it in the larger context of his ‘return’ to the spirit of classical Greece”; Levin continues, quoting Nietzsche, that “ ‘All virtues are physiological conditions,’ and even ‘our most sacred convictions . . . are judgements of our muscles’ ”; Nietzsche is seeking for a new ethics, a morality that can “overcome the Judeo-Christian hierarchy of values, which requires an extreme polarization of body and spirit,” prophesying that it “could be useful for us to refer back to the ancient Greek experience,”58 which provides us with a variety of paradigms freshly unfolded from human life and fantasy. Perhaps this is an admonition to remember as we navigate into the “future of flesh,” investigating bodily mutation and change in modern—and postmodern—times.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Homer 1:1–7. Redfield 476. Clarke 130, 147–148. Vernant 2001, 326. Snell 5. The immediacy and physicality of the body actively participating in the unfolding of events is noticed by Auerbach: “And this procession of phenomena takes place in the foreground—that is, in a local and temporal present which is absolute” (Auerbach 7). Furthermore, the scene of Odysseus’ recognition by way of his scar, discussed in the first chapter of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, inaugurates the history of the body’s place in literature as that of “reality,” since representation of the body is part of “external” reality. The moment of the recognition of Odysseus’


7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

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scar by Eurykleia provides an emblem of the focal role played by the body itself as a mark of identity. Clarke 115. The notion of an intelligent body returns in modern phenomenological thought with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “flesh,” which “moves us very much closer to an understanding of the body’s ‘participation’ in this spiritual dimension of existence. Thus, we might say that, ultimately, the gift of embodiment, the gift which is still so little understood, is the favoring of a local apotheosis in the vast field of Being” (Levin 68). Homer 22:306–336. According to Lesky, “Ludwig Curtius once spoke of the merging of god and man as a peculiarly Greek supposition that constantly recurred in new variations throughout Greek art” (Lesky 200). Jaynes 71–72. Tracing the gradual disappearance of the archaic mental operation, Jaynes also makes the proposition that, “This loosening of the god–man partnership perhaps by trade and certainly by writing was the background of what happened. But the immediate and precipitate cause of the breakdown of the bicameral mind, of the wedge of consciousness between god and man, between hallucinated voice and automaton action, was that in social chaos the gods could not tell you what to do” (ibid. 208–209). Vernant 1991, 28. In order to draw a radical distinction between the Greek (visible) and Jewish (invisible) conception of the divine, Laqueur quotes Freud’s assumption that for Judaism God’s invisibility “means that a sensory perception was given second place to what may be called an abstract idea,” that is, “a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality . . ., or, strictly speaking, an instinctual renunciation.” Giving a gendered dimension to “spirituality” by identifying it with “masculinity,” Laqueur adds: “Freud briefs precisely the same case for fathers as for God in the analysis of Aeschylus’ Oresteia that immediately follows his discussion of the second commandment” (Laqueur 57). Vernant 2001, 320. Ibid. 321. Fränkel 4. Du Bois 1995, 6. “For us the existence of a self with interiority, with a silent, private consciousness, harboring secrets of fantasy, imagination, sexuality, may seem perfectly inevitable. But this, like other assumptions of twentieth-century culture, is a construction, the result of a centuries-long process, of many transformations, accretions, and losses. We see in the work of Sappho the very beginnings of this process, the construction of selfhood, of the fiction of subjectivity at its origins” (ibid. 6). As Fränkel asserts, “If man’s spirit is so completely changeable, and if the instant which alters our nature radically changes our picture of the world also, the momentary state of the individual ego assumes supreme importance. The current situation of the individual finds artistic expression in short lyric poems which speak a direct, open, and natural language corresponding to the new realism. In a single poem the reaction of the speaker to what is at the moment happening is given an objective existence” (Fränkel 136); hence for Sappho, as for that of her near contemporary Archilochus, “the category of the present, with its opposite, the distant, takes on a special importance” (ibid. 187). Sappho Fr. 2.

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19. Sappho Fr. 46. 20. Peter Brooks’ proclamation of intention in his book Body Work might very easily have been adopted by Sappho to express the theoretical context of her poetry: “My concern is . . . mostly with the body in the erotic tradition, using ‘erotic’ to designate the body primarily conceived, and primarily become significant, as the agent and object of desire. I want to talk mainly about bodies emblazoned with meaning within the field of desire, desire that is originally and always, with whatever sublimations, sexual, but also by extension the desire to know: the body as an ‘epistemophilic’ project. The desire to know is constructed from sexual desire and curiosity” (Brooks 5). 21. Sappho Fr. 48. 22. “The simultaneity of bitter and sweet that startles us in Sappho’s adjective glukupikron is differently rendered in Homer’s poem. Epic convention represents inner states of feeling in dynamic and linear enactment, so that a divided mind may be read from a sequence of antithetical actions. Homer and Sappho concur, however, in presenting the divinity of desire as an ambivalent being, at once friend and enemy, who informs the erotic experience with emotional paradox” (Carson 5). 23. Sappho Fr. 130. 24. “Since the early sixth century or thereabouts the Greeks in general regarded homosexual love as more dignified and uplifting than love between the sexes,” because of its educative force that impelled the lovers “to provide and imitate a model of ideal existence by passionate emulation” (Fränkel 175–176). 25. Sappho Fr. 31. 26. Du Bois 1988, 147. 27. Du Bois 1995, 73. 28. “The ‘political’ thence denotes not matters of government (the legislation, execution and judgment of laws, say), but the creation, formation and sustaining of the historical identity of a people” (Bernstein 125). 29. Ferris 88. 30. Laqueur 62. 31. “In the harmonic body, the figure is constructed and expressed by geometry, and so the human form echoes the rules of nature in general, or the harmonies of the macrocosm specifically. Ultimately, any account of the history of harmonic bodies would have to evoke the lost treatises on the proportions of Greek sculpture, which contained mathematical rules for the figure” (Elkins 258). 32. Gregory Nagy informs us that the main myths about the foundation of the Olympian Games (Olympics) are as follows: they were founded by “the hero Pelops in compensation for the death of Oinomaos; alternatively founded by the hero Herakles in compensation for the death of his great-grandfather, Pelops; this foundation by Herakles can be treated as an act of refoundation or more simply as the most definitive foundation” (Nagy 119–120). 33. Ibid. 144. 34. Fränkel 506. 35. Clarke 294. 36. Ibid. 317. 37. Plato’s ambivalent and often contradictory attitude toward the body has been discussed extensively. A small sample of relevant comments, indicating the paradox of the “father” of metaphysics being reluctant to abandon physical corporeality, are for instance the following: “Clearly, Plato is simultaneously playing on


38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

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two levels when he proclaims that the body is nothing, yet he uses the language of the body to speak of the soul” (Loraux 39); also, “Thus Plato, too, stands at the crossroad of two traditions: the one, which goes back to the Orphic and Pythagorean sects, emphasizes that the body and the soul are different by nature and that the immortal soul’s residence within the corruptible body is an exile. The other, which inspired the moral view and also the aesthetic attitude of Plato’s Athenian compatriots, ranks the soul’s control over the body as a cardinal virtue but also celebrates the grace (charis) engendered by the union of the two” (Alliez and Feher 48). Referring to the Neoplatonic evolution of the body– soul reversed relationship, seeing the body as a reflection of the soul, Alliez and Feher note: “Plotinus regarded the human body as a degradation of the soul but also as a reflection of it; and his philosophy was not so much the occasion of a synthesis as a crossroad between two different worlds. Theoretically, it was a philosophy based on a notion of spiritual light—a noology—that did not correspond either to its heritage of Greek cosmology or to the Christian eschatology that it conditioned, but to which it remained uncommitted. In practice, it manifested a detachment at once radical and serene. It broke away from the exultation of graceful bodies that characterized classical Antiquity and that even Plato could never quite shake off” (ibid. 47). The etymology of psyche (soul) from the verb psycho (cool) as contrasted to zoe (life) from zeo (boil) may give us a linguistic interpretative guide to the complexity of philosophical and religious argument. Vernant 1991, 190. Snell notes that the “first writer to feature the new concept of the soul is Heraclitus. He calls the soul of living man psyche; in his view man consists of body and soul, and the soul is endowed with qualities which differ radically from those of the body and the physical organs,” explaining that actually not Heraclitus “but the lyric poets who preceded him were the first to voice this new idea, that intellectual and spiritual matters have ‘depth’ ” (Snell 17). So the selfconsciousness of the lyrical subject seems to have concretized itself into an immaterial interiority. Vernant 1991, 28. Detienne 7. Magli 88. “The Greek medical science contributed to this objectification of the body through anatomical and other forms of investigation. Advances in anatomy and anatomical illustration as well as further clinical evidence, far from weakening these attachments, made the body ever more a representation of one flesh and of one corporeal economy” (Laqueur 114). Zeitlin 209–211. Relating archetypal myths and religious practices to what appears to be a perennial urge for the destruction of the body, Detienne interprets the slaughter of the child Dionysus as “an exemplary tale, whose persistence throughout multiple retellings” tells us something not only about “Greek acts and practices of blood sacrifice” but also about sacrifice “as the central figure of religion and society combined” (Detienne 2). Euripides 862–896. Zeitlin 352. Euripides 1112–1135. Hillman and Mazzio xvii.

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51. “Now Dionysos will turn Pentheus from the one who acts to the one who is acted on, from the one who would inflict pain and suffering, even death, on another, to the one who will undergo those experiences himself. For now, however, the preliminary sign of Pentheus’s total defeat, at the hands first of Dionysos and then of the women, is given to us on stage in the visual feminization of Pentheus when he is induced against all inhibitions of shame to adopt the costume and gestures of the woman” (Zeitlin 342). 52. Ibid. 349–350. “Men too have bodies, of course, but in a system defined by gender the role of representing the corporeal side of life in its helplessness and submission to constraints is primarily assigned to women” (ibid. 351–352). 53. “To trace the course along which, in the unfolding of early Greek culture, European thought comes into its own, we must first of all understand that the rise of thinking among the Greeks was nothing less than a revolution. They did not, by means of a mental equipment already at their disposal, merely map out new subjects for discussion, such as the sciences and philosophy. They discovered the human mind. This drama, man’s gradual understanding of himself, is revealed to us in the career of Greek poetry and philosophy. The stages of the journey which saw a rational view of the nature of man establish itself are to be traced in the creations of epic and lyric poetry, and in the plays” (Snell v). 54. The “other” story is, of course, the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, of the “word made flesh”: “The insistence on the bodiliness of Christ is an endless source of narrative within the Christian tradition, since the adventures of the flesh on the way to the redemption of mankind provide a series of emblematic moments where spiritual significances are embodied” (Brooks 4). 55. Brooks 286. Questions of the relation between body and text are, of course, pervading most current theoretical discourse, as, for instance, Armstrong’s study on Modernism, Technology, and the Body, which poses the question: “Is the body internal or external to the practice of writing?” (Armstrong 6). Thus, meaning—all meaning—takes place in relation to the body whereas we are forever striving to make the body into a text. Donn Welton, in his introduction to Body and Flesh, speaks very cryptically of the constant efforts toward “our understanding of the altogether enigmatic nature of human embodiment. For it, the most obvious of things, is one of the most perplexing” (Welton 1998, 7). 56. More specifically, the unique contribution of “Merleau-Ponty and certain other existential phenomenologists, to the Western philosophical tradition has consisted in locating consciousness and subjectivity in the body itself. This move to situate subjectivity in the lived body jeopardizes metaphysics altogether. There remains no basis for preserving the mutual exclusivity of the categories subject and object, inner and outer, I and world” (Young 275). 57. In his collection of essays by various philosophers and theorists on the body, subtitled “Classic and Contemporary Readings,” Donn Welton introduces the basic twentieth-century thinkers who attacked the Cartesian model of the mind/body relation, offering an alternative interpretation defined as “phenomenological” or “hermeneutic.” As he explains in the introduction: “Of course, there were forerunners in the nineteenth century. Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche each employed concepts of the body to subvert Cartesian dualism. But only with the rise of phenomenology in this century (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) did an effective counter-tradition arise to what is still the dominant way of asking the question in much of analytic


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philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence programs. These ideas were then reworked and extended by a second cluster of thinkers (Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva and Irigaray)” (Welton 1999, 3). 58. Levin 33–36. Levin presents the philosophical move of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty toward “a phenomenological hermeneutics of the body”; he emphasizes Merleau-Ponty’s “retrieval of the elemental flesh in its primordial ecstasy,” through which “we can at last begin a truly ontological discourse concerning the body,” because, as he contests, “this is the first time in Western philosophy that we can work with a notion of embodiment which recognizes its true topology and specifies its ek-static openness as the basis for our organs of perception, gesture, and movement”; Levin specifies this alternative tradition that operates not through polarization, nor in making the body a reflection of the soul, but, on the contrary, promoting “an ideal which is implicit in the body of radically reflective experience”—an ideal described “in terms of its ‘spirituality’ ” (ibid. 68).

Bibliography Alliez, Eric, and Michel Feher. “Reflections of a Soul.” In Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Two, edited by Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi, 47–84. New York: Urzone, 1989. Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. 1953. Reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Barnstone, Willis. The Poetics of Ecstasy: Varieties of Ekstasis from Sappho to Borges. New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1983. Bernstein, J. M. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Brooks, Peter. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993. Carson, Anne. Eros, the Bittersweet: An Essay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Clarke, Michael. Flesh and Spirit in the Songs of Homer: A Study of Words and Myths. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Detienne, Marcel. “Culinary Practices and the Spirit of Sacrifice.” In The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks, edited by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, 1–20. Translated by Paula Wissing. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989. Du Bois, Page. Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. ———. Sappho Is Burning. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. Elkins, James. Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Euripides. The Bacchae and Other Plays. Translated by Philip Vellacott, 1954. Reprint, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1984. Ferris, David. Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

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Fränkel, Hermann. Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy: A History of Greek Epic, Lyric, and Prose to the Middle of the Fifth Century. Translated by Moses Hadas and James Willis. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962. Halperin, David M., John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin. “Introduction.” In Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, edited by David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, Froma I. Zeitlin, 4–20. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Heraclitus. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary, edited by C. H. Kahn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Hillman, David, and Carla Mazzio. “Introduction: Individual Parts.” In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, xi–xxix. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Martin Hammond. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1987. Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990. Lesky, Albin. “Divine and Human Causation in Homeric Epic.” In Oxford Readings in Homer’s “Iliad,” edited by Douglas L. Cairns, 170–202. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Levin, David Michael. The Body’s Recollection of Being: Phenomenological Psychology and the Deconstruction of Nihilism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Loraux, Nicole. “Therefore, Socrates is Immortal.” In Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Two, edited by Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi, 12–45. New York: Urzone, 1989. Magli, Patrizia. “The Face and the Soul.” In Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Two, edited by Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi, 86–127. New York: Urzone, 1989. Nagy, Gregory. Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Perniola, Mario. “Between Clothing and Nudity.” In Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Two, edited by Michel Feher with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi, 236–265. New York: Urzone, 1989. Pindar. The Odes of Pindar. Translated by Geoffrey S. Conway. Everyman’s University Library. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1972. Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. Randall, J. H. Jr. Plato: Dramatist of the Life of Reason. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. Redfield, James. “The Proem of the Iliad: Homer’s Art.” In Oxford Readings in Homer’s “Iliad,” edited by Douglas L. Cairns, 456–477. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Sappho. Greek Lyric. Vol. I: Sappho, Alcaeus. Edited by G. P. Goold. Translated by David A. Campbell. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and London: William Heinemann, 1982. Snell, Bruno. The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature. New York: Dover Publications, 1982.


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Suleiman, Susan Rubin. “Introduction.” In The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Susan Rubin Suleiman, 1–4. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1985. Vernant, Jean-Pierre. “A ‘Beautiful Death’ and the Disfigured Corpse in Homeric Epic.” In Oxford Readings in Homer’s “Iliad,” edited by Douglas L. Cairns, 311–341. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays. Edited by Froma Zeitlin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Welton, Donn. “Introduction: Foundations of a Theory of the Body.” In The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings, edited by Donn Welton, 1–8. Malden, MA; and Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. ———. “Introduction: Situating the Body.” In Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, edited by Donn Welton, 1–8. Malden, MA; and Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Young, Iris. “Pregnant Embodiment.” In Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, edited by Donn Welton, 274–285. Malden, MA; and Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Zeitlin, Froma I. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.


3

Th e De a d a n d D y i ng Body f rom Hu m e t o Now Thomas Laqueur

Let me acknowledge right from the start that my chapter title does—as

some of you no doubt fear—suggest megalomaniac pretensions; let me also acknowledge that I do understand that historians are wise to stick to their lasts and leave the really big picture—the sort of grand pronouncements about death or the dead body that I seem to promise—to others. These are the domain of philosophers, or writers, or artists who have been occupied with the subject since the very beginning. What had occupied Socrates, and Aristotle, and Epicurus, and Seneca now occupies, although in a different register, Heidegger, Agamben, Foucault, and Derrida. I will not take up the challenge that Derrida offers to the greatest of the historians of death— Philippe Ariès: that he (Ariès) assumes that we understand what death is or what it is to be dead is and that only through this philosophical naiveté is he able to produce his narrative. I cannot pretend to be more sophisticated than Ariès in this regard. I do, however, want to offer an alternative narrative to the one that Aries proffers, one that takes us away from the philosophical questions of what is death, or how does death define the meaning of life, or what is the relationship between Heidiggerian Dasein and death, and away also from the historical question of whether or not death has become “secularized” over the past three centuries. Instead I want to talk about death and the dead body as civilization making and to suggest that what is new about the dead among us—the dead in modernity—is that they are so continuously being called upon to lend their power to one view or another of what the world should be like in an age that has no fixed view of the subject. A pluralism of death undergirds and helps create a pluralistic, public sphere, if you will, of the living. I take Hume’s death as the beginning of this story; I take it to be exemplary of a decisive shift to a pluralism of death and the dead. In part I start with it because it is the first of the great eighteenth-century public confrontations with the possibility of a secular death: Voltaire died in 1778; Thomas

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Thom a s L aqu e u r

Paine in the first decade of the next century, although he lived 67 of his 76 years in the one before; Hume in 1776, the year the Wealth of Nations was published and American independence proclaimed. (Paine would make a useful starting point as well. Whichever account one accepts of Paine’s death, his body shared the fate of so many twentieth-century political bodies in its peregrinations: his unrepentant radicalism made him less than welcome in the new United States once; he was buried on his farm and forgotten until the eccentric British radical journalist William Cobbett dug him up and shipped his body back to his native England where it was promptly lost; in 1839 the world’s monument to Paine was erected on his farm over the now empty grave.) I could have chosen other moments from the lives of others in Hume’s circle. There is, for example, the discussion between James Boswell and Lord Kames about a medallion that the dying lord had commissioned for his monument. He did not like death’s head and bones and had asked for a veiled skeleton. Boswell told him that he thought it looked like an old woman’s skeleton and, besides, one ought not to tamper with these sorts of emblems. “Death is a figure well known.” “Death as a skeleton, Time with Wings, scythe and sandglass, Justice with scales,”1—once established one did alter emblematic forms as one pleased. But Lord Kames was not so sure. “Somebody,” he said, had “first invented an emblem. Why should another man not invent a new one.” “But it is a universal sign,” Boswell protested; once established “no—one would understand a new one.”2 And, there the conversation ended. My Lord was so weak he could neither rise nor sit down comfortably. A little more than three weeks later the great proponent of a naturalist aesthetic was dead. In this encounter, Boswell takes the conservative position: there is, he thinks, something fixed or at least something so old as to be essentially fixed about how we imagine death and the dead body: it is bones. Time cuts down humanity with its scythe. It is Kames who argues for the artificiality of such associations. Even if one cannot escape death, one can literally make up how one imagines it. Nothing about it being “un-representable”; death does not undo humanity but provide the opportunity for free play. Death and the dead body are up for grabs. Boswell would take a different tack when thirteen years earlier he plagued poor Johnson on the subject of Hume’s death or rather, in the first instance, Hume’s claim—which Boswell pressed on his friend—that one could get over the fear of death. Hume’s view on how such equanimity might be attained was certainly not original. Lucretius had said essentially the same thing several millennia earlier.3 No one is made anxious about contemplating the eternity when one did not exist before one’s birth; it is therefore irrational to fear the eternity of nonexistence that is death. Or, as Hume put it in Boswell’s account: he “was no more uneasy to think that he should not be after his life, than that he had not been before he had existed.”4 But the case that Boswell was pressing on Johnson did not turn on the state of being dead, or the meaning of death, or the possibility of immortality, or the relationships between death and pure knowledge. Neither religion nor philosophy was

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much in evidence. The debate seemed very much about facts. Put a pistol to Foote’s breast—an actor and producer who also claimed he was not afraid to die, or to Hume’s—and “you’ll; see how they behave” was Johnson’s first retort.5 But can we not fortify ourselves against death, insisted Boswell who began to feel a little uneasy at this point because Johnson was so clearly discomforted. This did not stop him. Johnson’s mind was, he writes upon later reflection, like a Roman amphitheater in which the lions were death and Johnson was like a gladiator who could manage only temporarily to keep them in their dens. “Let it alone,” Johnson insisted, “it matters not how a man dies but how he lives. The act of dying is of no importance.” Dying is short and of no importance. With “an earnest look,” he added, “a man knows it must be so, and submits. It will do him no good to whine.”6 “Give us no more of this,” Johnson retorted, manifestly agitated. “He expressed himself in a way that alarmed and distressed me;” “he shewed an impatience that I should leave.” And, he let it be known that he did not want to see Boswell any time soon. For his part, Boswell thought he had been too severely dealt with by Johnson even though he knew that he had, as usual, pushed matters too far. He sent a letter of apology saying he might have been wrong, “but not intentionally.”7 Perhaps. But Boswell knew his friend. Johnson was a man who was terrified of being dead all of his life; he said “he had never a moment in which death was not terrible to him.”8 The state of not being was a metaphysical reality, a “fururity” that “foiled” “even the powerful mind of Johnson.” He feared Death—big “D”—whatever that might mean. And Boswell had steered the conversation away from the grounds on which Johnson might have found some respite, however temporary. There was no opportunity for him to reaffirm his faith in Christ’s conquest of death and in the promise of resurrection and a life everlasting for all who believed in him. Instead, their talk was about questions of fact, questions about the physiology of dying, the sort of debate we might stage between Sir William Osler, who in the early twentieth century did the first systematic survey of how people actually die—all but a handful of his 486 cases in the Johns Hopkins hospital expired without pain into “a sleep and a forgetting”—and Sherwin Nuland, who in a recent best-selling book on how we die argued that the answer was, with few exceptions, miserable. Hume represented the antimetaphysical death, the death that had no more—but also no less—meaning than any other event of nature or human affairs. It was, as we might say today, “Humean.” And when it came to Hume’s time to die he behaved as his friends expected. He had already, a year and a half before his death, given a coolly clinical account of his last illness in a short autobiographical account that was attached to the last edition of his History of England: “in spring, 1775, I was struck with a disorder in my bowels, which at first gave me no alarm, but had since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution.”9 He said that he was not in much pain, that he had never worked better, and that he continued to enjoy the company of friends. According to Adam Smith, he spent his last days reading Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead. He

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made up a running joke in which he imagined himself arguing with Charon for why he ought not to step into the boat right away: “I have been correcting my works for a new edition. Allow me a little more time, that I may see how the public received my alterations.”10 Or this last gambit: “If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.” And here Charon lost his temper, “You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term? Get into this boat this instant.”11 Hume died, as his friend Adam Smith reported to the world by quoting a letter from his physician, Dr. Black, “in such a happy composure of mind that nothing could exceed it.”12 Charon was right in one sense. Superstition in Hume’s sense did not fall. It would be difficult to tell the story of death and the dead as the decline of superstition. Seventy-one percent of Protestants and 78 percent of Catholics in Marin County, one of the richest and most educated in the United States, believe in heaven (82 percent of Americans do nationally; 36 percent believe in reincarnation; and only 27 percent in a less new-age national sample).13 Indeed a peer reviewed scientific journal recently claimed to show that remote intercessory prayer, that is, prayer in which heart patients did not know they were being prayed for by distant anonymous supplicants, “may be an effective adjunct to standard medical care.”14 It would be difficult to argue that beliefs about death and being dead have become significantly more “secular” over the past three centuries if we give credence to numbers like these. But Charon was also wrong. Death and the dead body have come, since the eighteenth century, to have a dual existence. On one hand, they do still hold on to many of the old “superstitions”: terrible, freighted (indeed over-freighted) with meaning or, alternatively, giving rise to the abyss of aporia, a kind of bottom line, the limit case of interpretation, a constant— like the speed of light—that stands eternally outside the efforts of science to supplant. I use the word “superstition” because if death and the dead body are as amenable to culture as Hume and modern medicine hold, then to “stand over or above” (superstaˉre) it with feelings of awe or reverence is “superstitious.” But there is also an alternative view in competition with these superstitious ones. It does not hold that death is meaningless, but only that there is nothing that makes the problem of its meaning any more acute than the problem of giving meaning to the discrete events of the world more generally—the Humean problem. There is nothing metaphysical about being dead; there is nothing that has left a body that changes it from being alive to being dead. (The same holds, of course about being alive.) There is nothing to know specifically that gives us the ontology of death (or life). A dead body is a dead body and we can get on with the enterprise of giving it meaning. In death, as in politics, we make their own history even if we do not make it as we please. I might take on the history of this pluralism of the dead body—the metaphysical and the aporic, on one hand, and the empirical, the cultural, and the man-made, on the other—by looking at the history of the question of “what


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is death” or “when is a body dead” directly. This would match up nicely with my Hume story. Jacques-Jean Bruhier’s translation into French of JacquesBénigne Winslow’s dissertation on the uncertainty of the signs of death was published in 1742 and was followed by an ever-growing number of treatises on the subject of how to recognize death and tracts on various cases of mistakes, some recognized in time and some not. (An 1891 survey, reprinted in 1905, of the bibliography on signs of death produced four hundred and eighteen references.) But this would be to tell only half the story. This is a literature of diagnosis in which no one pretends to understand deeply the nature of the thing being diagnosed. Doctors have for a very long time been able to identify cancer without having the foggiest idea what the disease actually is, if it indeed is a thing. Likewise death, in the discussion of how to tell whether someone was really dead. When doctors in the late eighteenth century began developing criteria for distinguishing real from so-called apparent death, they understood that even though they could not precisely define life everyone could more or less agree on what signs in the body indicated that it was alive. Death was the cessation of these phenomena. In other words, death and the dead body as an instance of it are sufficiently familiar for us to treat them without knowing anything beyond the ordinary signs of physical diagnosis. They are part of the world of public policy and prognosis: ought one to bury this body or keep it around a little longer? Only recently—with the emergence of the so-called “brain death”— has the discussion moved again to something that smacks of the pre-Humean world of metaphysics. But we should not be fooled. The capacity for consciousness has replaced the presence or absence of the soul as an ontological sign of life and death, because of the pragmatic need to have a body be dead for one purpose—the harvesting of organs—but alive for another—that it not be buried or hustled off to a morgue before its parts are salvaged. When no such need exists, people seem perfectly happy to keep a dead body alive for a very long time, as of 1998 for more than fourteen years. If death can be “chronic,” Shewmon argues, it can be almost anything. I want to turn, however, to an arena in which the pluralism of death was made manifest on the landscape, in trees and stone. I want to turn to the history of the cemetery. In one sense, of course, the cemetery is not new. Extra mural burial places far from holy sites existed in antiquity and were indeed the model for their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century successors. But these burial places simply were; that is, they existed as what seemed the right and proper places for the dead. The modern cemetery on the other hand is a self-conscious and self-consciously radical alternative to a millennia-old tradition in the west of inhumation in or near a sacred place—the church—such that the bones of the ordinary dead partook of the sanctity of the special dead and formed an ongoing community with the living. This nexus was broken in the eighteenth century. It had, of course, been shaken earlier but it had also been reconstituted. Protestants and Catholics had gone their own ways and understood their dead differently, but no one questioned the core practices: burial in or near a church, a community of the dead, and a community of the living.

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The dead body moldered, and it was known to molder with its kind as a matter of course. This fixity within a community over some period of time is what was shaken when the pluralism of death came into its own: the place of the dead body and how it was to be understood would be in full cultural play. Lord Kames’ thoughts on the symbolism of death are not important because he was the first to want to veil some of the ugly facts. He was not. But he was among the first generation that self-consciously thought that it could pick and choose from an array of cultural resources to produce the dead body of one’s imagination. When, between 1729 and 1736, the 1st Earl of Carlisle built on the fields of Castle Howard in Yorkshire—to the designs of Nicholas Hawksmoor—the first freestanding mausoleum in Europe since Roman antiquity, he was selfconsciously rejecting more than a millennia of the history of the dead.15 It had seemed natural that bodies would be gathered together in or near churches. It was no longer so. Writ large, this gesture became—less than a century later— the modern cemetery. The cemetery reveals—and is the result of—two distinct but intimately related features of imagining death and the community of the dead in modernity. The first has to do specifically with the dead body. Increasingly absorbed into the language of medicine, hygiene, and chemistry, metaphysically meaningless, it became unbearably repulsive—everywhere but in the laboratory— in its purely and essentially material decay. William Hale, archdeacon of London in the 1840s and 1850s may well have been self interested in his opposition to the cemetery, but he was right that the motives of its proponents had, as he said, “their origin in a philosophical [and I might add visceral] distaste for the emblems and the reality of death.”16 And, as the decaying dead body became an object of scientific attention, it became also a source of acute anxiety and distaste, an anxiety that, I want to suggest, was displaced onto the monument and onto custom-built places of memory. As Père Lachaise, the leading English designer of cemeteries, put it, the cemetery was “dedicated to the genius of memory,” a place where, like the ancients, we moderns can contemplate death “never polluted with the idea of a charnel house . . . nor the revolting emblems of mortality.”17 Memory cleanses. More pointedly, one could, by hiring the right landscape architect, have whatever representation of death one wanted. The second has to do with community. The bourgeoisie who are the selfconscious creators and the exclusive—or in any case exclusively visible— inhabitants of the cemetery imagine therein a new world of their creation: a new community of the dead, represented in the clean, sweet smelling, wholly novel, real, and symbolic geography of the cemetery, gives a certain weight, solidity, and credence to a new community of the living. There is no visible place for the poor whose bodies had filled the churchyards and communal burial of the old regime, the Cemetery of the Innocents in Parish, and places like it elsewhere. There are, I want to suggest, two intersecting developments that produced in the nineteenth century a distinctly modern commemorative space


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of death and, more generally, the modern cult of memory and monumentality: the first under the sign of public health, although not in the functionalist sense in which this is usually understood; the second under the sign of imagined communities, the living refracted through the dead. The problem of filth and of smell lies at the core of what the modern cemetery represents. Dead bodies are almost nowhere in evidence, either in the art that litters the grounds of these new places for the dead or in the topography of the land itself. The language of “public health” is the language of that new, secular conception of the dead body that is so chastely effaced—not represented in a Père Lachaise or Highgate or a Mt. Auburn. But it would be to miss the critical cultural meaning of these new spaces if we were to tell the history of the cemetery as the relatively simple story of heroic, prescient doctors, enlightenment philosophers, and bureaucrats who recognized the danger to the health of the living of the corrupting flesh in their midst and agitated successfully to have it cast out. I will very briefly make a case against such a functionalist account, because I want to emphasize instead the culturally more intricate role that public health and a scientific materialist worldview did play in creating new spaces for the dead. If dirt is matter out of place, as Mary Douglas famously defined it,18 the question before us is why the dead body came to be understood as “out of place” where it had been put since at least the sixth century and why specifically the cemetery, of all possible solutions to the problem of disposing of corrupting human flesh, became the solution to making the dead clean again. It is not writ in heaven that, as happened in London in 1852, the Commissioners of Sewers should have replaced the Church as the legally recognized administrators of the city’s burials. In short, I want to treat scientists in the enlightenment tradition in the way anthropologists look at the clean and the not clean in other cultures. But at least some of my subjects were much more self-conscious than the “natives” studied by anthropologists in their culture making. However much public health reformers offered intellectual support for a new home for dead bodies, those who built these homes for the dead knew full well what they were about. Of course, cemeteries met a real problem, but it is one of long standing. Putting bodies in the ground is not economical in its use of land and the problem of an overpopulation of corpses that so exercised eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reformers had also exercised the men of earlier centuries. What is new is how our subjects understood it. It would, in fact, be difficult to know what “crowding” meant in the old regime of burial, in which one place had served generations of the dead for centuries if not millennia. The vestry of St. Botolph Bishopgate noted in 1621 that the churchyard was “buried so full,” there was scarcely room for a child; ever lengthening burial registers apparently do not reflect the problem.19 The Cimetiere des Innocents in Paris absorbed some two million bodies in an area of 60 x 120 meters during the seven centuries before its closure in 1780: that is, roughly 300 bodies/square meter. I do not want to suggest that there was no problem here. A terrible smell clearly hovered over the Les Halles neighborhood;

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the ground had risen by eight feet to cover the constant inflow of cadavers; Francois Pontrain, the last digger, was said to have buried 90,000 bodies in thirty-five years in five- to six-meter ditches. It was supposedly impossible for the people to keep milk fresh or wine from spoiling. But these problems had been evident for centuries and had not kept the outskirts of the cemetery from being a thriving place of business; Paris’ notaries, for example, had long congregated there. When George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, was buried in the Friend’s plot of Bunhill Fields—not a parish churchyard, of course, but almost its equivalent for dissent—Robert Burrow remarked it was large but “quite full”: 1100 bodies, dead from the plague or martyrdom in prison were already there.20 Ten thousand more followed Fox over the course of the next century. The prosperous or socially ambitious middling sorts, who from the seventeenth century on chose burial within the church itself, scarcely enjoyed more space, privacy, or rest. Ground beneath the pavement filled up fast. When Samuel Pepys in 1664 arranged the internment in the middle aisle of St. Bride’s for his brother, the sexton promised— after accepting a 6d tip—that he would “jostle them [other bodies] but [would] make room for him.”21 The compacting, composting, jostling and intermingling of corpses and coffins, in various states of repair, was a permanent condition, an inevitable consequence of two doctrines: the first that of “ubi decimus persolvebat vivus, sepeliatur mortuus,” (literally the right to be buried where one had paid tithes, but generally the common law right to be buried where one had lived); and second, implied by the first, the doctrine that the ground of the churchyard was, as Lord Stowell put it in the celebrated eighteenth-century case of Gilbert v. Buzzard, “the common property of the living, and of generations yet unborn, and subject only to temporary appropriation.”22 Thus no body could claim any space forever and, Stowell continued, “the time must come when his [the corpse’s] posthumous remains must mingle with and compose a part of the soil in which they were deposited remains.”23 Eighteenth-century population growth and urbanization certainly put more pressure on the system, but crowding was in the nature of the thing. Archaeologists estimate that the average English churchyard, in use for a millennium or so, might contain the remains of some ten thousand bodies. This explains the usual elevation of the ground above the level of the church floor and the lumpiness that is so striking in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury representations. In fact, these bumps are the last unleveled addition. From very near the beginning, gravediggers intercut, hacked through, turned over, and tossed out earlier tenants to make room for new ones and every hundred years or so apparently leveled the ground and started again. The lumps we can still see today escaped still another round of recycling when the bodies stopped coming and now, survivors from another age, they sit atop a layered jumble—a stratigraphy of bones—that extends at least a couple of meters above the subsoil. Or more. The most striking thing about eighteenth-century churchyards, a feature still visible in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, is that they were lumpy with mounds and


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troughs registering the uneven pace of the decomposition of bodies below. And things were, if anything, worse inside churches where, as we saw, the method of making room for new bodies was, as the sexton told Pepys, “to disturb other corps not quite rotten to make room.”24 (Readers of Goethe’s Elective Affinities will remember that one of Charlotte’s landscaping innovations in the churchyard was that graves were to be leveled, as they are in the modern cemetery, and the ground kept smooth for resowing.25) Crowded burial grounds and their attendant odors were not a discovery of the enlightenment; a radical solution was. The question is the one that Alain Corbin raised about smell; in this case, why corruption became pollution, why the exhalations arising from the putrefaction of dead bodies—their odor—should have come to be regarded as so particularly noisome. As Archdeacon Hale argued in 1854, his churchyard of St. Giles Cripplegate was essentially made of the compost of seven hundred years of burial and smelled, at the surface and in samples taken from six feet down, like compost, like ammonia. “The earth,” he says, “had the qualities which are attendant upon every heap of the farmer’s treasure upon every highly cultivated field.” How can the physiologist say in response to the natural and commonplace smell of a barnyard, he asks rhetorically, that we ought to “avoid this place because it is dangerous to health.”26 The key claim of the proponents of cemeteries was less that the crowding per se had become unbearable—although this did play a big part in English discussions of the late 1830s and 1840s—but that the public health dangers of rotting human flesh were now too evident to be ignored. In the interests of the living, the effluvia from the mortally dangerous dead simply had to be eliminated; bodies needed to be kept safely out of view and smell. I will not belabor the truth of this claim now, nor attend to its history, except to make three points: first, the dead body had been regarded as polluting before; the Rabbis who compiled the Talmud, for example, regarded it as the gold standard against which all other pollutions were measured. Pagan Rome, as classical educated Enlightenment figures pointed out endlessly, pushed the dead outside city walls. Second, putrefaction and the corpse had once been understood differently in the Christian West for a very long time. It was quite the opposite of polluting. Some dead flesh had the odor of saintliness in contrast to the odor of ordinary bodies; or corporeal corruption with all its attending unpleasantness represented an earthly state to be followed by a sweeter life, eternal, with a new incorruptible body; or, it was endured as part of the simply smell the order of things. Or, as in Protestant England, little was to be made of the dead body, the merely empty shell. And third, it was known that dead bodies in fact did not cause disease. Edwin Chadwick, the most prominent of the English proponents of the cemetery, got a chilling letter, the sort one would not want to get just before going to press from an expert in one’s field, on the eve of the publication of his famous 1843 report on internment in towns and cities. It was a comment on a draft version of his report on burial grounds from his colleague and Benthamite fellow traveler, Southwood Smith, and it was not encouraging: “The foundation of the whole subject,”

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Smith writes, “is that animal matter in a state of decomposition is injurious to health . . . Now it appears to me that the Evidence of that fundamental truth in your report is neither so strong, so succinct nor so varied as it might be.” Basically, he says, the report is not what is “necessary to produce a powerful impression on the public mind and recommends “greatly [the word is underlined in the letter] strengthening the evidence.”27 There was little poor Chadwick could do at that point. This should have come as no surprise. One of the most cited of all cases— in England, Italy, and the United States—right up through the 1840s was first reported in 1771 by a Montpelerian physician named Haguenot. He had had little success combating the universally accepted custom of burying the dead amongst the living in and around churches, he says, and so he wished to report the following observations in the hope of changing public opinion. Called to the Church of Notre Dame, he noted a putrid odor as he approached the crypt; it became more intense as the “cave” was opened. He put a burning taper into the depths and it was extinguished, “as if it were plunged in water.” Dogs, cats, and birds that were lowered into the cave died, within two minutes, for the most robust of the beasts—cats—and within seconds, for the most delicate—the bird. Bottles lowered into the cave collected a gas that still had their effect but not as strongly as it did in situ. He concludes that the “mephitis” in the “cave commune” were dangerous not only because the air had lost its elasticity, or because of the lack of air, but peculiarly because of “the corrosive exhalations of cadavers.”28 This last move is telling. Bernadino Ramazzini, the founding father of organic pathology, was certainly no great friend of unpleasant smells and certainly not of the stench of the tomb: “the noxious air of sepulchres poluutes the ethereal nature of the animal spirits,” he writes. But if anything, the smell of tallow is even more repulsive and “the animal spirits are put into disorderly motion” by that “putrid smell” as well. Likewise, laundresses suffer from the smell of disease and blood-saturated sheets that they clean, and miners are “disordered by the metallic exhalations which cloud the animal spirits.”29 The problem is smell in general and smell in enclosed places in particular; dead bodies are just one example. In the late eighteenth century, all of this is sorted out more clearly. James Curry, RMS of Edinburg, argued persuasively that there is indeed a common problem in mines, sewers, pump-wells, the holds of ships, and burial vault: the absence of freely circulating air. He points out that the fumes from charcoal burning, fermentation, and other chemical processes also produce something that makes air unhealthy: carbonic acid—CO2. Decaying bodies, in short, were not the problem, and others who write on the subject of death from bad air from a different perspective—rescuing the apparently dead from their stupors—have no particular interest in them. But the public health argument was successful. Why? There is a particular history for each distinct local case. Père Lachaise, opened in 1804, was, on one hand, the culmination of a long Enlightenment battle against clerical control of the spaces of death and, on the other, an affirmation of


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neoclassical and/or romantic aesthetics that were much debated during the French Revolution. In England, major cemeteries were in place well before the public health campaign began in the late 1830s, although the sweet memorial spaces of a Highgate, or Kensal Green, or a Glasgow Necropolis were clearly a choice by the middle classes for private memory and against community of the lumpy churchyard or crowded public crypt. Portuguese liberals faced the most significant popular protests of the nineteenth century in their efforts to close churchyards and place dead bodies under the authority of doctors: the Marie da Fonte rising, named after the woman who was regarded its leader. But at a more abstract level I want to suggest that a new group of people managed to capture smell for its worldview, its alternative vision for the dead body. Vicq d’Azyr, one of the leading French proponents of cemeteries and a widely translated authority, gives it away: in the old, superstitious days, he says, we carried our beliefs so far as to persuade ourselves that the “emanations from the bodies of the saints were capable of warming the hearts of the faithful and encouraging in them impressions favorable to zeal and piety.”30 It was against this “superstition” that the Enlightenment fought. And, once triumphant, the relation of the living to the dead would change: now carefully hidden the body would appear, he hoped, only in its representation, in new memorial practices linked specifically to the disappeared body. Vicq d’Azyr suggests that cenotaphs, mausoleums, tombs, or epitaphs mark where the bodies used to be, or far better, that they should be situated in new memorial parks, where the bodies themselves were chastely interred, one to a grave, permanently out of view and smell. The archconservative and traditionalist nineteenth-century Archdeacon of London, William Hale, is thus basically right: “the modern Hygiest [advocates] the entire separation of the mansions of the dead from the houses of the living for the sake of public health,” and the modern Epicurean, who holds the same view, because “nothing is so painful to him as the thought or sight of death.”31 Stripped of “superstition,” revealed in all and only its natural boldness, doctors and the enlightened public retreated in the case of its now exclusively materialist realities. Death, in other words, lost its lineage—its metaphysical centrality; the discourse and agitation of public health is more of a symptom than a cause of the displacement of the dead into new spaces. I want to emphasize that these new places were the result of a conscious cultural choice, of a conviction that one could—as Lord Kames had argued for emblems generally—fashion a new relationship to the dead body. One could, for example, make it more abstract. Just as paper money in the eighteenth century came to stand for gold, so the name, and perhaps the phrase “in memory of . . .,” could substitute for the more tangible dead bodies of the old churchyard and the announcement: “here lies the body.” The active imaging of an ascendant class made a new community of the dead; it rejected the old ideal of a “congregation of the dead,” as the eighteenth-century clergyman James Hervey wrote in one of the most widely read books of the next

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century—a historically rooted community of the dead belonging alike to a particular place—and substituted something else in its place. There were examples of this kind of choice before Père Lachaise, of course: the burial places of excluded communities, Jews for example, but this was still within the world of an isomorphic relationship, so to speak, between the living and the dead. There were also the extraordinary seventeenth-century freestanding tombs of the great East India merchants of Surat, whose Latin inscriptions and European pseudoheraldry on an essentially Saracenic building amidst tropical foliage produced the sort of weird bricollage effect that would so attract and repulse visitors to the nineteenth-century cemetery. Then in the 1760s there was Park Street Calcutta, opened in 1767, and soon filled with tombs that look like they might have come from roads leading out of a Roman city, but in fact were on the edge of Sir Elijah Impey’s deer park. Here public health was not an issue; Calcutta’s Church of St. Anne’s had tens of millions of acres of burial space available around it. The new colonial class simply wanted an alternative. In fact, the British dead of the empire, with no particular parish attachments, were amongst the earliest inhabitants of the new cemeteries. Major John William Pew of the Madras Army, Lady Bonham, wife of the commander in chief of Hong Kong, Major General Casement of the Bengal Army, various East India Merchants, were all, for example, buried at Kensal Green.32 Père Lachaise was almost a product, something created to appeal to its consumer’s desire for something “different.” It was reproducible; it was a tourist attraction. The Emperor of Brazil wanted a Père Lachaise near his capital and the Merchant Adventurer’s Company wanted one in Glasgow; the city father of Boston wanted one when they built Mt. Auburn. These new places offered customers a choice: the Glasgow Necropolis was built on land that had been leased for farming, then used as a quarry, and then in 1828 converted to its new use: “afforded a much wanted accommodation to the higher classes, and would at the same time convert an unproductive property into a general and lucrative source of profit . . .”33 Liverpool’s first cemetery was also on land that had been in a quarry, a big advantage since it allowed for tombs in the style of the patriarchs. (Highgate Cemetery had to build this feature along with other options. One could get a catacomb, or an Egyptian style tomb in a semicircle over which ran London’s first Macadam road, or a Roman tomb, or whatever one wanted and could afford. Woking cemetery offered the advantage of a railway line; likewise, Rockwood cemetery in Sydney.) These were landscaped places that were designed to create new associations for the dead body and to provide space for a new memory cult within certain limits. Père Lachaise was thought to offer too much ostentation and so the founders of Mt. Auburn in Boston limited the size of memorial and tried to make the final resting place blend into nature. They modified the Parisian picturesque. Other cemeteries followed other designs. But, the point was always what the architect Vanburgh had hoped for in the late seventeenth century when he proposed—unsuccessfully—that cemeteries replace


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churchyards as new places for the dead, where noble mausoleums of the sort one might have seen along the Appian Way would replace the tawny plaques on the walls of churches or the disarray of the churchyard where the vast majority of graves were not marked at all. In the new nineteenth-century cemetery the rich could imagine their dead as they pleased. The poor were not offered a choice. The dirty secret is that in fact the new cemeteries could survive economically only by egregious cheating on the one-grave-one-body program of the public health reformers. Whether in the fosse commune of the French cemetery or the British shaft graves, that with careful planning could hold thirty or forty bodies, the poor subsidized the middle classes. Unlike the churchyard, the nineteenth-century cemetery could only be “read” by and was readable to those with the money to buy property and markers there. There is also a peculiar aesthetic incoherence of the cemetery that produced unease in viewers as diverse as the radical liberal political economist, Harriet Martineau, and the high church Tory, S. A. Pugin. This might have been Boswell’s worse fears in his talk with Lord Kames. Martineau, for example, finds it strange that the Egyptian gate with its winged globe and serpent should have a quote from Ecclesiastes—“then shall the dust return to earth”—which belies both the Egyptian theme and the death-as-sleep-innature motif that dominates Mt. Auburn.34 She is equally puzzled why the Trier born, Boston buried phrenologist Johann Spruzheim rests under a tomb that is the facsimile of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, the Roman consul in 298 BC. It is not easy, she says, “to conceive how anything appropriate to Scipio would suit Spurzheim.”35 The answer turns out to be purely circumstantial and shallow, but also wonderfully liberating. The marble arrived just when Spurzheim died and the committee appointed to honor him saved time by purchasing it. Pugin is angrier at the “grossest absurdities” perpetrated by new cemetery companies.36 There is the superabundance of inverted torches, cinerary urns—but of course no ashes—and other pagan symbols. The entrance gate is usually Egyptian—a kind of orientalist fantasy in Pugin’s view that associates, falsely, discoveries along the Nile with the idea of catacombs, which the company sells. It is topped by Grecian capitals along a freeze giving the cemeteries’ name; Osiris bears a gas lamp and various “hawk headed divinities look on.” Hieroglyphics on a cast iron gate mean nothing; “they would puzzle the most learned to decipher.”37 And so would the aesthetics of the cemetery more generally. Different styles of monuments—you can buy whatever style you want— stand about one another. There is in principle no symbolic order, or historical order. But there is a space in which one could mourn and remember and think of death and the dead body in whatever fashion one could afford in the company of a veritable museum of styles and even bodies: Abelard and Heloise and Moliere were moved to Père Lachaise; John Know stood guard over the Glasgow Necropolis. Cemeteries were indeed something like museums—another new nineteenth-century institution—in the sense that they tamed the past and the dead. They put death in good order.

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The pluralism of death has reached an astounding complexity in our age. Doctors are now asked “to allow someone to die”; families are asked to “let go”; whether or not to “pull the plug” is hotly debated. Physicians now choose the time of death in 80–90 percent of the cases in the SF General ICU. Side by side with the inevitability of death is the language of choice and decision making. Indeed what count as dead and what one might do to hasten or retard its advent is literally a question for the liberal polity to decide by vote. Medical students, in addition to learning about the pathophysiology of dying and interpretation of autopsies,—something well within their professional competence—are also being asked these days to be the priests of death. A medical ars moriendi can be taught, and is taught in one of the most popular American internal medicine textbooks, as if it were another procedure and death another disease entity. The doctor and dying patient faces three “challenges” in the route to their common “goal”: “psychologic,” [sic]— “accepting the five stages of dying”; “social”—“expressing gratitude,” “reconciling with “significant others,” for example; and spiritual—“how are you within yourself”—the doctor should ask and the patient answer.38 A table just like that offered for the differential diagnosis of thyroid disease or high blood pressure offers a helpful “existential review of symptoms” to guide the physician in his cross-cultural journey. It suggests when and how the physician should ask the patient, for example, “how does your spirituality relate to your illness/dying and how can I help integrate your spirituality into your health care.” There is something ludicrous about this, although not more ludicrous than in many other arenas in which the old seemingly intractable, apparently eternal, strangeness of death—its metaphysical centrality—confronts the Humean truth that metaphysics has nothing to do with it and that we make of it what we please within the bounds of history and culture. Perhaps the dead body and death are so central to modern philosophizing and art making, because nowhere else is the disenchantment of the world more evident, the collapse of a metaphysically grounded worldview more apparent.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Boswell 1981, 29. Ibid. 30. Lucretius Book 3:862–870 and 3:970–975. Boswell 1906, Vol. 1, 377–378 (emphasis added). Ibid. Vol. 1, 378. Ibid. Vol. 1, 378. Ibid. Vol. 1, 378–380. Ibid. Vol. 2, 114. Hume Vol. 1, 17. Smith 16. Hume Vol. 1, 19. Ibid. Vol. 1, 20. Tobin and Lin 33.

D e a d a n d D y i ng B ody f r om Hu m e t o Now 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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Harris 2278. Colvin 316–321. Hale 15. Louden 11 (emphasis added). Douglas 36. Cited in Harding, 117. Beck 329–330. Pepys Vol. 5, 90, March 18, 1664. Phillimore 357. Ibid. 357. For eighteenth-century church topograph, see British Library, Pennant Collection; Pepys, Diary, Vol. 5, 90, March 18, 1664. Goethe Part 2, Chap. 1. Hale 15 ff. Chadwick Box 46. Haguenot 6 ff. Ramazzini 112–113, 128, 190, 48. d’Azyr 357. Hale 15. See Guide to Kensal Green Cemetery . . . new edition. Stang 28. Martineau Vol. 3, 272 ff. Ibid. Vol. 3, 281. Pugin 12 and plate 5. Ibid. 12. Tierney et al. 84.

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Curry, James. Popular Observations on Apparent Death from Drowning, Suffocation, etc., with an Account of the Means to be Employed for Recovery. Northampton: W. Birdsall & T. Burnham, 1792. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Praeger, 1966. Elliot, Brent. Typescript “Notes on the Rosary: England’s First Non-Denominational Cemetery.” Norwich Local History Library, 1982. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Elective Affinities. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971. Guide to Kensal Green Cemetery . . . new edition. London: C. and E. Layton, 1867. Haguenot, Henri. Melanges Curieux et Interressans de divers objects relative a la physique, a la medicine, a l’histoire naturelle. Chez Joseph Robert: Imprimeur de l ville, 1771. Hale, William. “Intramural Burial in England Not Injurious to the Public Health; Its Abolition Injurious to Religion and Morals.” London, 1855. Harding, Vanessa. “ ‘And One More May Be Laid There’: The Location of Burials in Early Modern London.” London Journal 14. 2 (1989): 112–129. Harris, W. S. “A randomized, Controlled Trial of the Effects of Remote, Intercessory Prayer on Outcomes in Patients Admitted to the Coronary Care Unit.” Archives of Internal Medicine October 25; 159. 19 (1999): 2273–2278. Hervey, James. Meditations among the Tombs. Burslem, J. Tregortha, 1811. Hume, David. “The Life of David Hume, Esq. Written by Himself.” In The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. Foreword by William B. Todd. 6 vols. Vol. 1, 13–18. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983. Louden, John Claudius. On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemetries and on the Improvement of Churchyards. With Sixty Engravings. London, 1843. Lucretius. De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) with an English translation by W. H. D. Rouse, rev. with new text, introduction, notes, and index by Martin Ferguson Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Martineau, Harriet. Retrospect of Western Travel. Vol. 3. London: Saunders and Otley, 1838. Nuland, Sherwin B. How we Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter. New York: A. A. Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1994. Osler, Sir William. “A Study of Dying, Typewritten ca. 1904.” Bibliotheca Osleriana #7644, McGill University Library, Montreal. Pennant Collection, British Library, MS text accompanying the engraving, vol. vii, no. 180, BM, Dept. of Prints and Drawings. Phillimore, Joseph. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Ecclesiastical Courts at Doctors Common. London: Joseph Butterworth and Son, 1827. 3, 335–367. (Report on Gilbert v Buzzard and Boyer, Consistory Court of London, Hilary term, 1820.) Pugin, Augustus Welby. An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England. London: John Weale, 1843. Pypys, Samuel. The Diary of Sameul Pypys. Vols. 5. Edited by R. Latham and W. Matthews. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971. Ramazzini, Bernadino. Health Preserved, in Two Treatises. I. On the diseases of artificers, which by their particular callings they are most liable to. With the method of avoiding them, and their cure . . . II. On those distempers, which arise from particular climates, situations and methods of life . . . by Frederick Hoffman. translated and enlarged, with an appendix, by R. James . . . The second edition. London, 1750.


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Shewmon, D. A. “Chronic ‘Brain Death’: Meta-analysis and Conceptual Consequences.” Neurology 51. 6 (1998): 1538–1545. Smith, Adam. “Letter from Adam Smith. LL.D. to William Strahan, Esq.” In The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. Foreword by William B. Todd. 6 vols. Vol. 1, 18–21. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983. Strang, John. Necropolis Glasguensis. Glasgow: 1831. Tebb, William C. Premature Burial and How It may be Prevented: With Special Reference to Trance, Catalepsy, and Other Forms of Suspended Animation. 2nd edition. London: S. Sonnenschein, 1905. Tierney, Lawrence M., Stephen J. McPhee, and Maxine A. Papadakis, eds. Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005. Tobin, Gary A. and Y. C. E. Lin. “Religious and Spiritual Change in America: The Experience of Marin County.” Marin Community Foundation, n.d. Vanburgh, John. Manuscript. Bodleian Library. University of Oxford. Winslow, Jacques Benigne. Dissertation suir l’incertitude des signes De la Mort, et l’abus des enterrmens et embaumemes Precipites. Traduit et commentee par Jacques Jean Bruhier. Paris: Morel, 1742.


4

L a ngsc a pes of De at h, I nsc a pes of M e mory, a n d P h i l ok t e t e s’ Post mode r n Pa i nsc r i p t Savas Patsalidis

What I cannot see, I can touch. What I cannot touch, I can see. What I cannot see, I can imagine. What I can imagine is mine to keep. What I cannot imagine is not mine —John Jesurun, Philoktetes Even in the midst of other people, everybody’s locked inside his own world —John Jesurun

Postmodern Langscapes

We know that in standard theater, language is used to advance plot, cre-

ate character, provide exposition, and resolve tensions. In short, language “embodies an attitude toward explanation and truth that is not untypical of attitudes we frequently bring to bear on our own lives.”1 This is not the case, however, with the work of many contemporary American playwrights whose narrative structures not only avail from guaranteeing a basic explanation for dramatic situations and conflicts, but constantly refine techniques to avoid it, “ingeniously complicating the process of writing, and thus extending the Stein tradition one generation further.”2 According to Robinson, “Stein was the first American dramatist to infuse the basic materials of dramatic art with independent life, making them noteworthy themselves. She reanimated language, letting it be heard for its own sensual qualities, no longer just serving stories but now aspiring to the same radiance as, say, a wash of paint on an abstract-expressionist canvas. She rethought the use of gesture in the theater, devising a poetics of movement, wherein simple actions have beauty and significance apart from their functions. The rhythms of dialogue, the syntax of sentences, and the physical relationships among characters became

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S ava s Pa t s a l i di s

as important as what they said.”3 Commenting on the term “langscape”4 that Bowers introduced to describe Stein’s work, Carlson claims that Stein’s plays “rarely if ever are involved as landscape would seem to be, with the verbal depiction or evocation of a scene, but that they nevertheless are involved with spatial configurations of language itself that, like landscapes, frame and freeze visual moments and alter perception.”5 If one shifts attention from Stein’s langscape to more contemporary langscapes created by playwrights such as Mac Wellman, Richard Foreman, Caridad Svich, Sam Shepard, Maria Irene Fornes, David Greenspan, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, Eric Overmyer, Len Jenkin, Jeffrey Jones, Wallace Shawn, and John Jesurun, among others, one will see that the connotations of Bowers’ interesting neologism are even more varied. As Carlson once again observes, moving “outward from Stein’s spatial arrangements6 of language in general to verbal explorations of the language of space itself, of geography, of mapmaking, of travel, even of astrology,” recent American dramatists create plays “for the ear and the imagination” rather than the eye. Released from its traditional requirement to tell a story and create psychologically developed characters, their language acquires the dynamics of performance, offering shelter to emotionally complex structures and fleeting thoughts that to be appreciated require “the multiple, moment-to-moment shifting focus of postmodern spectatorship.” 7

Jesurun’s Playfield(s) John Jesurun began his artistic career at Yale where he experimented with sculptures that moved. Under the influence of Bunuel, he turned to writing and shooting short film scripts, and from there he went to La Mama and started making plays—“pieces in spaces,” he calls them in his bio note that prefaces his play White Water 8 —where he proposes a postmodern poiesis that loosens its historically representational moorings and opts for a stage world where everything is blurred, fragmented, and juxtaposed, a mixture of live and prerecorded voices, a collage of quotations, analogies, and images, that needs to be contextualized with—read with and against—other cultural forms such as films, television, and comics in order to be fully understood and appreciated. Jesurun’s theater is not “the theatre of good intentions” that Mac Wellman talks about in his provocative essay on the present state of American theater. Nor is it a theater of “Eucledean characters,” where “each trait must be perfectly consonant with every other play.” It is a theater where fantasy spins out in a stream of images and dreams that create an edgy, intuitive path that explores “the full damage done by the onslaught of political lies, right-wing hucksterism, and general consumer-society madness on the inner person.” 9 In Jesurun’s hallucinogenic universe, time, place, and identity are in a constant flow. Each scene emphasizes the discontinuity of the mind’s performance rather than its continuity, but most importantly, it emphasizes the importance of language, whose tones, cadences, pitches, volume, and pacing, in short its

P h i l ok t e t e s’ P o s t mode r n Pa i ns c r i p t

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continuous variability, provide the vehicle to enter the private zones of memory and create a playfield of gaps, absences, abjections, and unexpected combinations of intense dramatic moments that body forth “the coexistence in [a single] sentence of an infinite series of viewpoints,”10 each containing its own intricate layering of meanings that not only erases clear-cut divisions between real and imaginary, living and dead, and male and female, but also keeps the reader/viewer always uncertain as to the meaning of things. Every time a sentence (or a scene) ends, earlier conclusions no longer hold. The reader/viewer must start over. In other words, their whole is not experienced as a unit but as “moments” or “turns,”11 an accumulation of multiple engagements with the spoken and sung words whose complexity follows the disobedient instincts of the imagination rather than the orderliness of the intellect, thus adding to the readers’ (or viewers’) frustration, since they are always trying to figure out what the writer is trying to do and how s/he fits in with the things they know about drama in general as well as about life. Philoktetes, a play Jesurun wrote specifically for Jan Ritsema’s 1994 production at Kaaitheater in Brussels with the umbrella title PhiloktetesVariations—based on three modern renderings of Sophocles’ tragedy (the other two being André Gide’s and Heiner Müller’s, each in its original language)—is a good example of his postmodern aesthetic and ideological concern with the problematics of identity, an idea we also encounter in his earlier work (Deep Sleep and White Water, among others). Philoktetes is unique among Greek tragedies. For one thing, this is the only tragedy without a single female character. There are also fewer characters than in any other play of Sophocles. Its ambiguity is also remarkable. The constant interplay between truth telling and fabrication, health and disease, and human and bestial, its dichotomy between signifier and signified, its complex interchange between texts and subtexts, and sanity and insanity, make the spectators continually unsure of its premises, forcing them to delve below the surface of the spoken and acted word to understand what the character really feels or intends to do.12 This multiple layering seems to perfectly fit the writing style of writers such as Gide, Müller, and others who take advantage of the text’s hidden potential, its contradictions and ambiguities, to explore new ways of presenting the subject and the subject’s abject. In Gide’s reading of the story, for example, the focus is on the existentialist progression “from love of one’s country, to love of another, and finally to the most valid love: love of self.”13 In Müller’s text the attention is on Philoktetes as the anti-Greek betrayer of nation and national virtues, an antisocial element that in former Eastern Bloc countries implied punishment (Philoktetes is killed by Neoptolemus: the subversive element must die).14 In Jesurun’s adaptation, death has actually won. Philoktetes speaks from the underworld. What we watch now is a memento mori, the linguistic performance of a ghostly mind haunted by memories. Jesurun draws on Sophocles’ imagery of disease to highlight the isolation of his central hero by turning language into the primary site in which the effects of this isolation are detailed.

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Re-membering Pain, Re-enacting Death The play opens with an actor being carried to his grave, while a funeral is being performed on stage. It is Philoktetes’ funeral who is now cast in the role of a “talking corpse narrating,” a desiring “I” without organs, a “nomadic subjectivity”15 whose main concern is man’s quest for a healed, unified self in the age of postmodernity. Ron Vawter, the American actor who embodied Philoktetes three times in Jan Ritsema’s triptych, naked and covered with purple Kaposi rash, made the connection between the performance’s “here and now” and the story’s “there and then” as well as between life and death, subject and abject in his first audience address when he said that he was suffering from AIDS: “I am dying, I am on my way to the grave but am just doing this performance on the way.”16 His confession brought together the two circumstances in which the body’s material presence is undeniable, according to Forte. One is that of pain and another is that of live performance.17 As an actor, Vawter made his body so manifestly and painfully there that it shaped the process of reception of the character. That is, by inserting his own narrative enclaves of loss and pain, he brought into play and into the play two aspects of himself: (a) the performer who fabricates these impressions and (b) the character who is the impression fabricated by an ongoing performance that entails them both. It is in cases like this that the theatrical metaphor about which Goffman talks takes hold: talk about the self is not so far removed from enactment.18 And to a certain degree, my reflections in this essay are influenced by the theatrical representation and the recovery of the body’s presence in a memory play, where this presence is foregrounded and validated through a combination of Brechtian representational techniques with an Artaudian interest in bodily affliction (and abjection). Like Mac Wellman’s dead narrator Scheherazade in The Land of Fog and Whistles, who “every god damn night for 24.161 years . . . must tell a story and everyday the story must be different, only the story I tell is always the same,”19 Philoktetes’ ghostly body can be reconstituted only in the space between its disappearance and the memory of it. Everyday he has to enter acting space to re-enact events already enacted, to revisit places and re-experience emotions, re-store, re-configure all the things that conspire to erase the traces of his personal history, that is, time, lethe, absence. What he is called to do is an act of re-membering, and remembering, as Carlson argues in his book on the haunted stage, is theater; since the preexisting discursive field can never be recovered, it can only recycle past perceptions and experience in imaginary configurations that, although different, are powerfully haunted by a sense of repetition.20 Along similar lines, States notes that “If something is to be remembered at all, it must be remembered not as what happened but as what has happened again in a different way and will surely happen again in the future in still another way.”21 This process of repetition (of loss, pain, decay, etc.) is most useful for uprooted or variously colonized or marginalized people in the sense that it can provide a crucial discursive terrain


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for reconsolidating selfhood and identity. The very act itself keeps certain moments of thought alive, giving people the time to reflect on things with greater self-consciousness and if necessary take action. As Walter Benjamin points out, memory “creates a chain of tradition which passes a happening on from one generation to another.”22 Absence of memory produces feelings of anxiety and fear and fills the “idea of death . . . with profound terror.”23 Yet not everything is memorable, says Nietzsche; only that which never ceases to hurt stays in memory.24 And that is the case of Philoktetes who, being inside the system of pain, facilitates the memory to repeat it without fear—and that is a form of resistance: Listen to me. I’m telling you something. So that you’ll learn the value of suffering, the . . . language of the dead. I’m telling you something. You tell someone else and they’ll tell someone else.25

Philoktetes’ “Listen to me” alludes to Hercules’ closing lines in the original text—“Listen to my words”26 —that tell the audience what will happen next as well as to Gertrude Stein’s work Listen to Me, where we are invited to watch the writer-protagonist confront a fragmented world of experience and accommodate it in her life. In the place of Neoptolemus’ question ti draso (“What shall I do?”), which foregrounds the strong ethical dimension of the original tragic agon as well as the issues of choice, decision, and action, in Jesurun it is Philoktetes’ painscript and the act of its (theatrical) repetition that take center stage and provide the play with its special rhythm. Since the original suffering and its intensity can never be recovered—only “a shadow of its aversiveness can be grasped”27—Philoktetes can only enter into the thoughts himself and turn his adventures into “sites of memory,” that is, an imitation (repetition) of the former pain of a former self, of a former life, of a former living body,28 forcing things out of joint, out of bounds, and out of time, in the sense that the memory, let alone the very “experience of pain itself creates its own time out of interrupted time, its own coherence out of incoherence.”29 For the performance site of this cinematographically structured twelvescene retelling of betrayal, pain, and death, Jesurun maintains Sophocles’ barren landscape of Lemnos, but not the central image of Philoktetes’ primitive dwelling “with the two entrances.”30 Jesurun’s Philoktetes, being kicked out “of the cripple wing because [he] was making too much trouble,”31 now lives alone in a horrible hotel, drinks marguerita, and sometimes soaks his wounded leg in it. The performance field Jesurun reconceives for his dead hero is mostly a linguistic rather than a mimetic one that yields itself to an array of interpretations, ranging from the “black hole” of discrimination (Philoktetes was thrown off board due to his bad smell and present uselessness),32 to a prison cell, a red neon light district, a postapocalyptic no-place where meaning stubbornly refuses to arrive or arise, to a metaphor of a horrible, disintegrating world—possibly the underside of postmodern (American) culture—and most importantly to a magical space, an extension

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of the human mind that reveals the creative powers of the individual soul as boundaries between subjective and objective, self and universe, life and death, theater and reality were thus annihilated. Within this unspecified field, anything goes, Philoktetes tells us: What I cannot see, I can touch. What I cannot touch, I can see. What I cannot see, I can imagine. What I can imagine is mine to keep. What I cannot imagine is not mine.33

Like Beckett’s Endgame, where the mise en scéne operates as the visual image of Ham’s mise en abyme, Philoktetes is structured as a succession of present instants that “externalize an internal conflict occasioned by an event to which the mind must respond.”34 In his isolation, cut off from the healthy human society for ten years, living with and like the beasts, Philoktetes has learned to put up with his “impure, evil-smelling, unclean thing god has inflicted curse and malediction, contempt and abusement, infamy, ire and degradation as upon no other people.”35 In other words, he has learned what it means to live in a body as a body, a suffering body, a rejected body, and gradually a degendered (a dead) body.36 As Garner observes, in extreme situations such as exhaustion, and in the case of gravely ill patients consumed by suffering, there is a tendency to withdraw from the world and the live human body into a physical body that begins to feel like a burden, no longer “belonging” to the patient. This strong sense of the loss of self, along with an awareness of the physical body as a “thing” within the lived body, allows “the materiality of the body and its vulnerable articulations not only to exemplify but constitute the semantics of performance.”37 Philoktetes’ presence is first felt through his groan that establishes pain as the overwhelming image: the signifying body in extremis.38 And since the language of pain has no referential content to express, one must both “objectify its felt characteristics and hold steadily visible the referent for those characteristics.”39 Within this context it is with special significance that the part of the body that is bleeding in both texts of Philoktetes is the “harsh-devouring,” “blood-drinking,”40 “beast-infested”41 foot. As Stallybrass argues in his article “Footnotes,” traditionally the foot has been a sign of power. For example, kissing the feet of the Pope was (and in many ways still is) a custom indicating submission. By putting his feet upon his enemies, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine makes them his footstool. The poor are “what the social body walks with and what the social body bruises . . . The foot is what is stepped on. But the head of society is never footless; the head’s feet are the active instruments of subordination.”42 There has always been a connection between the limping of the body and the limping of the body politic. Those who are fortunate have firm and solid feet. The less fortunate drag them like Philoktetes, or limp like Falstaff, or lean on a crutch like Northumberland in Henry IV, or have feet of clay, or “putst the wrong foote


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before.”43 Caliban is a “footlicker” ready to kiss Stephano’s feet.44 Sophocles’ Philoktetes calls his foot “my jailer, my executioner.”45 His objectified foot takes on an existence independent of himself. “Pain . . . pain . . . Demon pain . . . / Twisting, torturing . . . / My foot . . . / How can I bear it? / Why can’t I die?,”46 Sophocles writes. “My leg, the smell, the pain, the howl. My toe, my foot, my leg, my legacy,” Jesurun rewrites.47 “I recognize you by your foot,” Neoptolemus tells Philoktetes who answers back: “My foot is dead, kid. I was looking at it outside. It had one fly on it. Fuck my foot kid, I’ m nobody. Who am I? No one.”48 The disease that pursues him also marks him as its own. “Tragic characters,” Worman writes, “who come into contact with this monstrous element [of pain and frenzy] often become marked by physical excretion: froth at the mouth, excrescent diseases, or dripping gore.”49 Like Alcestis’s veil in Euripides’ play, appropriate to mourning, Philoktetes’ bite inscribes on his body his internal disturbance, signaling his subject position as one caught between life and thanatos (“dead foot walking”50), the unspeakable and the unrepresentable. Part a daemonic mass and part human, half way between one state and another, the diseased body of Philoktetes eludes fixed categorization and defeats Odysseus’s logic. Philoktetes is very accurate when he says: “. . . leave your bags of logic and order packed. They don’t mean a thing here in the vicinity of my putrid leg.”51 In similar terms, his bow, the most powerful stage object in Greek drama, as Michael Walton says,52 a divine weapon given to him by Heracles out of gratitude for the lighting of the funeral pyre on Mount Oeta—and now used to kill animals and ensure the possessor’s survival—hints at Philoktetes’ hybrid status, his imaginary “other” face, the power of a powerless body whose grip on cities and nations can still be a destabilizing element. The meeting of the bleeding body and the bloody bow results in a hybrid body, present and absent at the same time, strong and weak, heroic and degraded, “less than a god, less than a man,” “a rotting aubergine covered in red garlic sauce,” a human being and a “stinking thing.”53 Philoktetes is never fully defined. As Bronfen notes, a corpse cannot be gendered; it is an “anonymous, inanimate body, pure materiality without soul or personality . . . the corpse is a figure without any distinguishing facial traits of its own . . . semiotically it serves as an arbitrary, empty, interchangeable sign, an interminable surface of projections.”54 The thingness of the dead body allows the ghostly narrator to look at it from a certain Brechtian and Artaudian perspective— “inside out.”55 At one point Philoktetes is presented as a “goddess,”56 somewhere else as “self-born,”57 at another point as a “woman,”58 an “animal,”59 “a ghost,”60 a fabricated absence, and elsewhere as an imagined presence: Philoktetes: This is my place. My body. Odysseus: And we want it, dead or alive. Philoktetes: Seeing that it’s neither. You can’t have it.61

The body is projected as an arena of political contest, ontological debate, and theatrical display, the interface between subject and world, the site of

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the abject, a thing body given its full weight and physical presence at the same time that it is erased. Like Prospero, Philoktetes’ ghost is conducting his own magic by rearranging the performing spaces of (dis)appearances. Look, see, here it is—now you can see it, now you cannot. He does not see Neoptolemus and Odysseus as saviors but as intruders who “interrupt” his experience and performance of pain: Philoktetes: You came back because you want me to wipe the disgrace off your face. [. . .] My foot may be rotting but you are the rot. We’ re a triangle and indivisible, one nation under an absent god, and you broke the triangle and now you’ ve come to put it back together. I’ m the stinking missing link you’ ve been searching for these ten years.62

Odysseus is so unfeeling, unscrupulous, and cunning that he is ready to do anything not to fail. He is honest enough when he says: “Me in this body who would eat my own children, sleep with my mother, rape my sister, kill my father, give birth to my own brother, destroy my own family to preserve what’s left of it. If that’s what I have to do.”63 Odysseus has no personal stake, except that stake in success.64 He also wants to find out what Philoktetes has learned being there all alone, performing amid the sole company of animals. Can he ever go back to civilized society? To what state of mind is he brought? As mentioned earlier, Philoktetes can only share the performance of the pain but not pain itself; “I’d love to share the pain with you but it’s not possible. You see, I’ve become very greedy with it. What have you learned since you left me here?”65 As long as Philoktetes was destroying on the battlefield (an)other’s body, he was unaware of pain and death, of colonizers and colonized. He was society’s useful tool for manipulating power relationships and relocating subject positions. It is only upon turning to his own body position and materiality that he finally finds out things about himself, his subjecthood. Watching his body decay in total isolation, he comes to grips with his own (and others’) reality, with the fact that there is nothing godlike about the observed body, particularly the body in crisis.66 Like Hamlet, Philoktetes discovers mortality stinks, smells, suffers, bleeds, vomits, “shits in the ocean, then on the altar to the crucified, then in the temple, then on the words that tell nothing.”67 Neoptolemus and Philoktetes stichomythic exchange is revealing enough, for it comes to reinforce the early connection between human and animal, inside and outside, subject and abject: Neoptolemus: Tell me, what god’s asshole have you climbed out of to have ended up in this toilet? Who excreted you, who vomited you up? What jeckyl-headed god’s spleen hurled you up? What faghag goddess gave birth to you, and why? Philoktetes: What neurotic soul dreamed you into my galaxy of pain? Neoptolemus: [. . . .] What steaming pustle erupted you? [. . . .]


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Philoktetes: And what god’s fart blew you here to disturb my peace and quiet? To interrupt my pain? [. . . .] Neoptolemus: What satyr ejaculated you into my sphere? What impotent ant spit you in a fit of disgust? [. . . .] What dying man exhaled you? What reeking hyena rejected you? [. . . .] What cell mutated you into existence?68

In this fragmented litany of abuse, this eruptive speech bubble with the synesthetic quality, the act of speaking takes precedence over every other aspect of the story; it renews its energies as it restlessly moves from one unpredictable utterance to another, it acquires life at the moment it expends itself. And, as it does, the spectator moves along, never tired of following its nonsequential manner for there is a sense of discovery for him/her as well. No shared grand narrative holds its ground here. Along with the body’s self-transcendence, the oracle is also demythologized. We are told that it “was written by some horny, monkey-fucking monk and you know it.”69 The language of the classic heroes is debased and so are the origins and the act of birthing. Identity as a coherent stable whole is once again challenged and gender switched. Jesurun foregrounds the key images of physical and social decay through the various parts of the fragmented body and their function (heart, health, excretory organs, bones, joints) and watches the deepening entrapment of the subject in the sphere of materiality, of how pain objectifies the human body in its material being. The body that is mortal, “isolated within itself, subject to the annihilating force of pain, the suffering body, emblem of this condition is no longer,” as Garner argues, “the seat of an externalizing productivity, the center of an individual and social Lebenswelt; instead, it becomes something thinglike and objectal [. . .] a self-enclosed point of sensation in a derealized world empty of human content.”70

Border Aesthetics and Hybridities The creation of boundaries through the articulation of space protects the destabilization of subjectivity, Lutterbie writes, “while allowing the subject relative freedom of movement. The negative effect of these boundaries is that they place limits on others and on their ability to experience the same freedom of self-expression.”71 By transversing cultures (ancient/modern, Greek/American), ontologies (dead/alive, male/female, theater/life), and landscapes (real/imaginary, centre/margins), Jesurun makes all sorts of boundaries negotiable. It is clear from the way he recreates Sophocles’ narrative that he is not interested simply in reentering the well-guarded mythscape of the old text to reproduce the familiar but also to transgress it, to give his own voice to it, to accommodate his postmodern aesthetic. In many ways he does what Derrida does with words: he discovers within the meaning of things their opposite member. It is as if he is telling us that we both need the classic model in order to understand the points being made, and simultaneously should reconsider its significance. To this end he creates a polysymous

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no-man’s-land that allows Philoktetes to operate as a hybrid subjectivity that passes from one field to another, a postmodern “border creature” excluded from membership in the Greek polis (or its modern equivalents) and at the same time a crucial figure in the fight against Troy; almost dead yet in possession of a deadly weapon that can lead to more deaths; human but living on Lemnos like an animal (“you are the lowest of all animals”72), a character in a drama and also a performer of it, extremely vulnerable and yet invincible (thanks to Heracles’ bow), a man but also with the woman within. “Would you like to bleed without pain? Drink milk instead of stagnant water,” the creatures of the island ask him as soon as he arrives there: A woman holds the moon in her body. . . . A woman can hold life in her body. . . . A woman can bleed painlessly. A woman can produce milk. . . . I believe you are soon to become a woman. . . . Several weeks later I began menstruating.73

What is foregrounded here is the idea that the biological subject is not a stable site of self-transcending subjectivity—the object-world it inhabits no longer supports its self-transcendence—but a vulnerable and ever changing “heap of assembled parts”74 that is permanently degendered by the intrusion of death. This is a typical case where the body becomes the site of the abject which, as Kristeva says, generally resides at the borders of the subjective identity’s existence and makes itself known by that which disrupts people’s sense of propriety, aesthetics, and order.75 In Sophocles the last-minute intervention of Heracles, the deus ex machina, disempowers the abject and forces Philoktetes into compliance with the preordained pattern. The god’s verbal contact drives the exiled hero away from the “uncivilized,” pre-linguistic, marginal space and back to the civilized and healthy society that has betrayed him. As Ian Kott points out, “healing is always payment for submission”; and Philoktetes is the “only one of Sophocles’ tragic heroes who is broken.”76 He quickly forgets his commitment to a heroic code of values that prohibits his return to an army that had rejected him, and bids farewell to the painful yet creative and “unruly” Lemnos/Theater of Dionysus—like Prospero’s farewell to his island/theatron in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.77 In more political terms, “all social systems are vulnerable at their margins, and . . . all margins are accordingly considered dangerous,”78 so Philoktetes’ relocation minimizes his disruptive potential. The boundaries of the body are kept together, but not in Jesurun’s version where Philoktetes stays on this “rock like a cold piece of meat”79 and calmly accepts his isolation, mental and geographic. After all, the people he “could remember were dead. Or if they were alive, they probably were so old that they couldn’t remember me. But there was no way I could ever get back, because you see, in time the geography between here and there had gotten farther and farther apart.”80 His experience has opened his mind to a deeper knowledge of the human condition and deeper insights into the essence of things. At first “I had wanted to tell you about my deep and unrelenting and unequivocal disbelief and unbelief in everything. But now I have changed my mind.”81 By the end


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of the play, Philoktetes’ living with his deformed body and unbearable pain acquires nobility. All the things that have posed a threat to identity throughout the play by making the body alien have also conferred identity, a sense of selfhood, to the individual. His final attitude embodies a very personal, almost Dionysian, response to pain and death: resistance and hope and in the end a realistic acceptance. In Sophocles, Philoktetes wants those who caused him pain to suffer: “My life is torture—but if I see them dead, / If you punish them, I’ll think my pain is cured.”82 Lemnos may not have turned him from a hero into a beast, but it has intensified his hatred and resentment. We have to wait for the coming of Heracles to bring cure, glory, and a new language (of unity). Jesurun’s Philoktetes finds beauty “in the center of all ugliness”:83 I used to love my beautiful little body, my skin, my smell, my blood, my body. If no one else will love it then I will love it because it’s mine and only mine. My skin, my smell, my blood, my body. Mine and only mine because it’s mine and beautiful because it can endure even its own ugliness. Mine and only mine. Mine by right of conquest.84

Jesurun has created a character who refuses the fate assigned to him by myth and decides not to abandon his performance space and serve the group’s needs: So I realized I just had to stay here and live with it. And so I’m staying here and I’ m happy to stay here. One day that door opened and it filled up with light. And I went outside where everyone else was. And everything else just became memory. And so that’s it. Good night.85

The journey that has begun as an adventure in an unfriendly landscape has gradually extended into an esoteric landscape of the soul (a mise en abyme). By the end of the play we feel literally enveloped by a thick layer of dark, postapocalyptic images and words that help us enter an entire field, the “total environment of the performance, as performance, and as an imaginative construct. We are no more transported to another world than we banish all other worlds.”86 In this sense there is involvement, but it is a disorienting one. Philoktetes’ statement early in the play prepares us for this lack of closure: “I’d like to read a nice book now and then with a story in the middle that goes nowhere.”87 Robinson makes the point when he writes that “one never leaves these plays believing an idea has been definitely dissected or a passion fully spent.”88 There is always something left behind, suspended in midair. As Philoktetes promises, he will first give us “the clue, then the story, then the real story. First, what they saw, then what was seen, then what was.”89 The only way to engage in the event is not through realistic viewing but meditatively, through the eyes

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of the imagination, being prepared to go where an unpredictable word or image or character might wander and be able to enjoy the new places that language and the soul’s and body’s adventures open up, without the guarantee of a finale, the stillness of an exit that would resolve all tensions and lead to some kind of catharsis. Jesurun refuses to resolve the questions the play raises, because, as Andreach points out, “to resolve them is to choose one set of answers over another—to choose naturalistic humankind’s determination over metaphysical humankind’s hope.” Furthermore, “in terms of the theatrical self, ending the quest means settling on a permanently fixed, unitary standard, which is death. In theater as in life, Apollonian form opposes Dionysian fluidity, which is life, the flux which generates creativity.” What he finally claims is that one’s wholeness contains multiplicity, which in turn contains contradictions and ambiguities. The resolution therefore lies within “the self which, containing multiplicity, can channel impulses into choices.” 90 Tompkins general comments on abjected bodies apply here: “These multiply located bodies make no attempt to incorporate a whole: they express, physically as well as psychically, the multifarious manifestations of the self/ identity/subject position. There are no illusions of unity: the selves remain fragmented . . .” 91

In Conclusion Jesurun’s play is far from affectless or ahistorical. It confronts and reconceives the unity of the past in the hope of being able to go forward. By recapturing Sophocles’ traumatic story as a remembered moment and binding it up with the postmodern Now, Jesurun comments on the meaning of suffering and how suffering affects the (dis)unity of the (performing) body and by extension the (dis)unity of the social body of present America that, cluttered with memories of war, of “futile fightings in the Indochimney,” 92 of pain, of betrayal, and violence, threatens “to overwhelm its anguished inhabitants.” 93 Philoktetes’ words to Odysseus sum up things for us: . . . take the bow back to Troy and win the battle for the empire. Pile the bodies high, and when you’re done with that, prepare the next pile. Because the thought that brought you here demands ten times ten skyscrapers full . . . of beautiful bodies in screaming red sacks . . . all to glorify our own stupid selves; and then goes on and offers him another blood and honey sandwich.94

The prophetic words of Georg Büchner’s Danton fit here: “These days everything is worked in human flesh. That’s the curse of our times.” 95 The list of lost heroes before the Trojan gates easily stands in for fallen soldiers and social outcasts in the “real” world surrounding the theater performance.96 There are no winners in this “battle,” Jesurun concludes. “All are defeated. . . . Convinced that the enemy is the dead body. Instead of screaming


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at each other, they scream at the body. Instead of insulting each other, they insult the body”:97 Philoktetes: What a horrible world you must live in. Odysseus: You live in it, too. Philoktetes: I don’t live in it. I live under it.98

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

Quigley 223. Robinson 180. Ibid. 2–3. Bowers 26. Carlson 2002, 147. See also Fuchs 94–95. Stein is very precise when, talking about her play Four Saints in Three Acts, she says that she “made the Saints the landscape . . . A landscape does not move nothing really moves in a landscape but things are there, and I put into the play the things that were there” (128–129). Carlson 2002, 147. Fuchs 102. Jesurun 1987, 76. Wellman 2002, 236. Deleuze and Guattari 19, 167. Watt 8. Ringer 106. McDonald 13. Laermans 69–70. Nomadic subjects, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “pass from one field to another by crossing thresholds: we never stop migrating, we become other individuals . . . and departing becomes as easy as being born or dying” (85). Laermans 68. Forte 51. Goffman 252. As Lutterbie notes, it is also here that performativity comes into being, that is, a series of acts that can happen only once because the state, having been brought into being, can only be reinscribed through repetitions that cannot alter the situation. In other words, if performativity is bringing into existence a state of being through an act, whether linguistic or a subversion of gender, performance is precisely the act: the doing that enacts signification (15). Wellman 1993, 53–54. Carlson 2004, 3. States 119. This is particularly striking in postmodern theater, Carlson argues, which has tended to favor “material haunted by memory, but in an ironic and self conscious manner quite different from classical usage . . . the postmodern theater is almost obsessed with citation, with gestural, physical, and textual material consciously recycled, almost like pieces of a collage, into new combinations with little attempt to hide the fragmentary and ‘quoted’ nature of these pieces” (2004, 14). Benjamin 1969, 98. Benjamin 1977, 139. Nietzsche 61. Jesurun 1994, 71.

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26. Sophocles l. 1420. 27. Scarry 215. 28. Rimmon-Kenan talks about the “performance of the absence,” in her essay on the paradoxes of repetition (156). See also Bronfen’s essay on repetition and representation (1993, 103–129). 29. Frank 65. 30. Sophocles l. 16–17. A doubleness metaphorically most fitting for the doubleness of the ensuing action and also an appropriate topos of encounter between mortals and the divine, reality and magic, life and death (Ringer 72). 31. Jesurun 1994, 77. 32. Odysseus’ comments in the original story are revealing enough: “Even at Festivals, / We hardly dared touch the wine or meat: / He gave us no peace; day and night, he filled / The Whole camp with groans and curses cries / Of ill omen that spoiled the sacrifice” (l. 9–12). 33. Jesurun 1994, 75. 34. Andreach 154. 35. Jesurun 1994, 78. 36. This Brechtian detachment from and subsequent observation of the body also echoes Heiner Müller’s Hamlet in Hamletmachine whose opening lines—“I was Hamlet. I stood at the shore and talked with the surf, BLABLA, the ruins of Europe in back of me”—point, among other things, to the actor/character relationship as well as to the body’s deterritorialization and dematerialization. As Peggy Phelan argues, Müller is using the performer’s body “to pose a question about the inability to secure the relation between subjectivity and the body per se” (151). He deliberately reinforces the impossibility of reconciling “who I am” with “what I am” in order to increase tension and make the spectator aware of potentials, however unrealized or unrealizable, that signal the difference between the experience of self and the limitations on representation imposed by cultural discourses (also in Lutterbie 20). 37. Garner 109, 44. 38. Here is how Sophocles introduces his hero: First Sailor: Listen! Neoptolemus: What is it? First Sailor: I heard a groan, The cry of a man in pain .... Dragging himself along, Moaning with pain. (l. 203–207) 39. Scarry 4, 9, 17. 40. Sophocles l. 694–695. 41. Ibid. l. 698. 42. Stallybrass 314–315. 43. Dent qtd. in Stallybrass 315. 44. Stallybrass 315. 45. Sophocles l. 785–786. 46. Ibid. l. 1185–1189. 47. Jesurun 1994, 86. 48. Ibid. 91. 49. Worman 6. 50. Jesurun 1994, 71.


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51. Ibid. 86. 52. Walton 89. 53. Jesurun 1994, 74. This is in accord with the bow image in the original, where just as language and meaning, words and actions are torn asunder by Odysseus’ plotting, so too the bow suffers an analogous fate, as a prop whose proper use is subverted by the wounding of Philoktetes and his abandonment by his comrades (Ringer 118). 54. Bronfen 1992, 64. 55. Jesurun 1994: 89. 56. Ibid. 72. 57. Ibid. 72. 58. Ibid. 73. 59. Ibid. 75 60. Ibid. 88. 61. Ibid. 88. 62. Ibid. 78. 63. Ibid. 78–79. 64. Winnington-Ingram 282. 65. Jesurun 1994, 79. 66. As Nietzsche points out: “What offends aesthetic meaning in inner man— beneath the skin; bloody masses, full intestines, viscera, all those sucking, pumping monsters—formless or ugly, or grotesque, and unpleasant to smell on top of that” (qtd. in Blondel 220). 67. Jesurun 1994, 83. 68. Ibid. 84. 69. Ibid. 82. 70. Garner 168. 71. Lutterbie 87. 72. Jesurun 1994, 71. 73. Ibid. 74–75. 74. Braidotti 12. 75. Kristeva 13; Tompkins 505. 76. Kott 169, 183. 77. Ringer 125. 78. Butler 132. 79. Jesurun 1994, 90. 80. Ibid. 91. 81. Ibid. 71. 82. Sophocles l. 1043–1045. 83. Jesurun 1994, 75. 84. Ibid. 82–83. 85. Ibid. 91. 86. Fuchs 106. 87. Jesurun 1994, 71. 88. Robinson 182. 89. Jesurun 1994, 71. 90. Andreach 157, 158. 91. Tompkins 510. 92. Jesurun 1994, 74. 93. Carlson 2002, 152.

76 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

S ava s Pa t s a l i di s Jesurun 1994, 76. Büchner 67. Ringer 110. Jesurun 1994, 87. Ibid. 79.

Bibliography Andreach, Robert J. Creating the Self in the Contemporary American Theatre. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. ———. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London: Verso, 1977. Blondel, Eric. Nietzsche: The Body and Culture. Stanford University Press, 1991. Bowers, Jane Palatini. “They Watch Me as They Watch This”: Gertrude Stein’s Metadramas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. ———. “Risky Resemblances: On Repetition, Mourning, and Representation.” In Death and Representation, edited by Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen, 103–129. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Büchner, Georg. “Danton’s Death.” In The Complete Works of Georg Büchner. Translated by Henry Schmidt. New York: Avon Books, 1977. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Carlson, Marvin. “After Stein: Travelling the American Theatrical ‘Langscape,’ ” In Land/Scape/Theater, edited by Elinor Fuchs and Una Chauduri, 145–158. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002. ———. The Haunted Stage. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Dent, Arthur. The Pain Mans Path-way to Heauen. London, 1601. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Euripides. Alcestis. Edited by A. M. Dale. Oxford: Clarendon, 1954. Forte, Jeanie. “Focus on the Body: Pain, Praxis, and Pleasure in Feminist Performance.” In Critical Theory and Performance, edited by Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992. Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Fuchs, Elinor. The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater After Modernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Garner, Stanton B. Jr. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Goffman, E. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959. Jesurun, John. “Philoktetes.” Theater 25. 2 (1994): 71–91.


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———. White Water. In On New Ground: Contemporary Hispanic-American Plays, edited by M. Elizabeth Osborn. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987. Kott, Ian. The Eating of the Gods: An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy. New York: Random House, 1973. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York, 1982. Laermans, Rudi. “Halfway to the Grave.” Theater 25. 2 (1994): 67–70. Lutterbie, John H. Hearing Voices: Modern Drama and the Problem of Subjectivity. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997. McDonald, Marianne. The Living Art of Greek Tragedy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by W. Kauffmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1967. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Quigley, Austin E. The Modern Stage and Other Worlds. New York and London: Methuen, 1985. Rimmon-Kenan, Schlomith. “The Paradoxical Status of Repetition.” Poetics Today 1 (1980): 151–159. Ringer, Mark. Electra and the Empty Urn: Metatheater and Role Playing in Sophocles. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Robinson, Marc. The Other American Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Sophocles. Philoktetes. Translated by Kenneth MacLeish. London: Methuen, 1990. Stallybrass, Peter. “Footnotes.” In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, 313–325. New York: Routledge, 1997. States, Bert. Dreaming and Storytelling. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Stein, Gertrude. Lectures in America. London: Vintage, 1988. Tompkins, Joanne. “Breaching the Body’s Boundaries: Abjected Subject Positions in Postcolonial Drama.” Modern Drama XL. 4 (1997): 502–513. Walton, Michael. Living Greek Theatre: A Handbook of Classical Performance and Modern Production. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Watt, Stephen. Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998. Wellman, Mac. “The Theatre of Good Intentions.” In Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century, edited by Maria Delgado and Caridad Svich, 229–240. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. ———. “The Land of Fog and Whistles.” Theater 1 (1993): 52–58. Winnington-Ingram, R. P. Sophocles: An Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Worman, Nancy. “Infection in the Sentence: The Discourse of Disease in Sophocles’ Philoktetes.” Arethusa 33 (1995): 1–36.


5

F l e sh ly Ev i l s: C l i n ic a l a n d C u lt u r a l ( I L)L ogics of t he Chron ic Pa in Su bj ect i n C on t e m p or a ry U. S . S o c i e t y Cindy L. Linden

Prior to the discipline of medicine firmly establishing its grip as the authori-

tative discourse of and about pain, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of his personal experience with intractable pain in a somewhat humorous but clearly distinctive and remarkably insightful aphorism as follows: “I have given a name to my pain and call it ‘dog’. It is just as faithful, just as obtrusive and shameless, just as entertaining, just as clever as any other dog, and I can scold it and vent my bad mood on it, as others do with their dogs, servants, and wives.”1 Bracketing the classism and sexism inherent in this statement, I turn my attention to Nietzsche’s choice of metaphor for his pain. As a dog lover, I find myself cringing, ever-so-slightly, at the disciplinary measures Nietzsche visits upon his canine companion. As an individual who lives with chronic pain, however, I am intrigued by the appropriateness of his tropic substitution. Perhaps what appeals to me most is the stark contrast between Nietzsche’s companion—who is not only meddlesome and brazen, but faithful, clever, and entertaining, as well—and the unfailingly derogatory late twentieth-century American conceptions about and representations of pain. For unlike Nietzsche’s dog, who provides at least occasional comfort and companionship, who, as a best friend, loves him and does so unconditionally, discourses and representations of chronic pain circulating in the United States during the past several decades depict a very different creature. Most frequently characterized as explosive, incapacitating, ferocious, and destructive, intractable pain is rarely imagined in contemporary U.S. society as possessing any redeeming qualities whatsoever. Chronic pain has, in fact, become so engrained in national consciousness as a state of evil that it frequently functions metaphorically in journalistic and cultural representations to refer to any number of undesirable states, conditions, or behaviors. Such narratives promote pain as anything from a “beast” to be slain, 2 to God’s most terrible of instruments,3 to the enemy against whom battle must

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C i n dy L . L i n de n

be waged. John Galt, Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosopher in Atlas Shrugged, proclaims that “pain is an agent of death” while suggesting that anyone who “knows nothing but pain” is a “thing unfit for existence, no longer human and less than animal.”4 Believed to be capable of possessing or capturing the soul and disfiguring one’s very being, chronic pain and its sufferers become iconographic figures of postmodern evil and the targets of a domestic war fought on several fronts. This most recent transition in the reconceptualization of pain began with a biomedical paradigm shift that transpired over the course of several decades ranging from mid- to late twentieth century and resulted in several key changes in the social and cultural constructions of chronic pain and those who live with it. To begin with, a new medical specialty was created complete with its own taxonomy and two new subject groups—the medical pain specialist (or algologist) and the chronic pain patient.5 Creating this specialty involved the division of pain into two distinct categories—the useful and logical bodily symptoms known as acute pain, and the unruly, unmanageable, illogical symptoms that collectively constitute chronic pain. It is worth emphasizing the distinction here—while acute pain continues to be perceived as a symptom or collection of symptoms brought about by a causal primary assault on the body (through trauma, disease, or the like), chronic pain is transformed (at least in theory) into the disease itself. This move not only helps to assure the establishment of the new medical discipline, it also opens the door for thinking about individuals living with chronic pain as a relatively homogeneous, stable, and pathologized group. Whether or not contemporary society generally and widely accepts chronic pain as a disease state is questionable, a consideration that is highly relevant to general perceptions of individuals living with intractable pain. To be certain, twentieth-century pain specialists have developed several broad and heterogeneous classes of signs and symptoms in the process of constructing what is tantamount to various syndromes such as neuralgia, causalgia, and other reflex sympathetic dystrophies and myofascial pain syndromes. While syndrome is generally used to refer to a concurrence of signs and symptoms in a recognizable pattern, and while each of these syndromes is classified by distinct sets of signs and symptoms, syndromes (like most classifications related to chronic pain) share the common feature of an unidentifiable causal mechanism. Significantly, it is the interrelation of symptoms in a recognizable source that distinguishes disease concepts from syndromes. Understood in this manner, it would seem that none of these syndromes have “progressed” to full-fledged disease status, at least not in any widely accepted way. An article in Newsweek’s May 19, 2003 “Next Frontiers Series” about fibromyalgia—one of several chronic pain syndromes attributed mostly to women—provides a typical example of how these conditions are generally perceived. Newsweek journalist Anne Underwood reports that fibromyalgia was thought to be “ ‘all in the heads’ of sufferers,” to be imaginary because “no obvious source of pain” could be located.6 It is this element of mystery and doubt that most heavily mediates chronic pain subjects’ interactions with

F l e s h ly E v i l s

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others: physicians and the lay public alike continue to view these syndromes, not to mention the individuals diagnosed as suffering with them, with a skepticism that often borders on animosity. Certainly this helps to explain the highly antagonistic relationship that frequently exists between algologist and chronic pain patient, as well as the reasons the chronic pain patient is the target of so many “obvious prejudice[s],” as observed by Dr. Nelson Hendler.7 Despite the fact that pain specialists have devoted the better part of half a century to efforts at uncovering or discovering the causal mechanisms of these various syndromes, any true consensus seems a distant promise. A review of the literature reveals that some specialists claim to have succeeded in locating that mechanism in the patient’s psyche. Others insist that it is to be found at various sites within mechanisms of the organic body. And in a break from the long-standing Cartesian duality of mind and body, still others argue that it is located in a sort of dialectic between the two. Regardless of the location of the causal mechanism when identified, the primary motivation for the sensate experience of chronic pain is consistently connected to a biological or psychic defect, flaw, or malfunction. On one hand, directly connecting chronic pain to deviant conditions of the body and/or mind allows physicians to assuage the general public’s fears that anyone and everyone is susceptible to the horrors of this “most disabling” disease. Currently, healthy individuals can rest assured that they are somehow essentially different from those individuals who suffer intractable pain, that their biologic or psychic constitution is somehow superior to that of these unfortunates, that they are too fit in mind and body to ever fall victim to such a condition. On the other hand, situating the organic body or psychic mechanisms as the primary motivators for such experiences perpetuates a long tradition in which the body is perceived as something to be feared or, at the very least, mistrusted. The body, when foregrounded by the sensations of intractable pain, seems to not only remind us of our mortality, it also points to the constructedness of many primary features of the “postmodern moment,” or what Fredric Jameson interchangeably refers to as late capitalism. The following discussion traces this process of the pathologization of persons living with intractable pain and illustrates its influence in their profound stigmatization. I begin by arguing that the first classified chronic pain patients were injured veterans of the Second World War and uncover the prominent stereotypes about veterans that were influential in the classification of these individuals as chronic pain patients. Arguing that a complex process of projection and overdetermination occurs between these pain physicians and their chronic pain patients, I contend that a conflation of veteran stereotypes and chronic pain symptomatology leads to the feminization and racialization of these patients. Finally, reflecting on the moral judgment inherent in disease language, I argue that the pathologization of individuals living with chronic pain marks them as iconographic embodiments of suffering in the postmodern moment, a move that effectively aligns them with evil and positions them as primary targets in a domestic war against evil.

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Encounters with the Alien As recent events in Iraq help to highlight, one of the defining characteristics of the United States is its military prowess. For better or worse, the United States has a global reputation as a military superpower, an economic, technological, and strategic genius. Arguably, since its official entry into the Second World War, the United States has, to varying degrees, initiated, intervened, or participated in more wars or “conflicts” than any other nation in the world. It should not tax the imagination, then, when I suggest that this most prominent characteristic of national identity plays out on the home front as well. Domestic battles are regularly waged, often in response to challenges raised against dominant social values or myths. One such domestic conflict is the war currently being waged against chronic pain subjects, a battle led by members of the field of pain medicine and joined by troops from all media and cultural venues. What admittedly begins as a well-intentioned and compassionate effort to manage and relieve the suffering of individuals living with intractable pain eventually transitions into a stereotyping project of impressive magnitude. In order to understand how this transition occurs, it is necessary to first gloss how veterans, and particularly wounded veterans, were perceived as they returned from the Second World War. As the first classified chronic pain patients, wounded Second World War veterans serve as enlightening “objects” of analysis. Rather than propose to understand the conditions of returning servicemen as they actually existed, the following relies, instead, on the dominant ideologies circulating about veterans as the Second World War came to a close and the consequences of those ideologies for the emergent chronic pain patient. Two highly influential texts were circulating in anticipation of the end of the Second World War: Columbia University Sociology professor Willard Waller’s 1944 manifesto Veteran Comes Back and the National Research Council’s propagandistic tract Psychology for the Returning Serviceman.8 While Waller’s study claims to illuminate “the veteran problem” and provides suggestions for overcoming the “danger” posed by the returning soldier,9 the NRC purports to represent “psychological facts about why [veterans] think and feel as they do,”10 presupposing that it knows precisely what and how veterans think and feel. For Waller, the veteran is “broken” and “wasted,” in need of repair; he has been “used up” and “sacrificed.” More importantly, Waller warns that the serviceman is an imminent threat to society; he knows both “how to kill you” and “take your bread.”11 Finally, Waller emphasizes three traits as primarily defining the veteran’s state of being—bitterness, anger, and isolation. Never escalating to the exaggerated rhetoric adopted by Waller, the NRC nonetheless notes that it is an “old story that men back from fighting feel estranged . . . and bitter and resentful toward those who have stayed at home and escaped the hardship and suffering of real contact with war.” The NRC warns the serviceman and his loved ones that he “may carry home . . . an accumulation of anger that [he is] ready to let out against almost anything.” Even more tellingly, Chapter one of the NRC tract opens


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with a declaration that it will prepare the returning serviceman to enter a “new life,” one in which the civilians back home speak a “different language” and “live in a different world.”12 Ruled by hostile emotions, this alien veteran is someone to be feared. Texts such as Waller’s and the NRC’s embody two related goals: The veteran must be set apart from the “norm”; he must be “Othered” so that he, in turn, will be susceptible to the ideological reprogramming that will enable him to think and function as a “productive” member of society. Yet, the returning serviceman, and most especially the injured veteran, suggest Waller and the NRC, requires reprogramming precisely because he is different, because he is “Other.” Furthermore, the veteran who fails to make that transition, who fails in the reprogramming efforts, is not only perceived as abnormal, he is personally to blame, as the NRC makes clear in the following: “nature still needs some help from you yourself”; “Once a man gets . . . medical care, the usefulness of pain is over . . . If you can keep from thinking about your pain and discomfort even for a few minutes at a time . . . you will be more likely to help yourself improve”; and finally, “Your mind cannot heal flesh, knit bones or kill germs, but can hinder their healing if you are emotionally upset.”13 The primary message underlying these statements is that the veteran can and will become well if he takes control of his unruly body. Controlled, rational thinking, in other words, will heal this body. A failure to get well, by contrast, signifies that he is ruled by the flesh and its affiliate sensations and emotions. Aligning the “sick” veteran in this manner with flesh and sensation similarly aligns him with traditional and stereotypical notions of femininity. Historically, women have been oppressed based upon stereotypes that depict them as overly emotional, and, perhaps more importantly, have been pathologized based upon those beliefs. After all, the psychoanalytic diagnosis of hysteria was based in large part upon such entrenched beliefs. As such, the gender implications of these messages are glaringly apparent; characterized in this manner, the injured veteran who refuses14 to get well is clearly feminized. He is, in important respects, a reconstituted hysteric whose excessively emotional state manifests in physical symptomatology. This portrayal, among others, is ultimately passed on to chronic pain patients in general as illustrated by the predominance of cultural imagery that depicts pain sufferers as female.15 In addition to displaying the image of a female “pain sufferer” on its cover, the inside pages of the May 19, 2003 issue of Newsweek picture seven of nine pain patients as female, and of the two photographs of male pain patients, both are rather androgynous in appearance. In addition to feminizing and/or “Othering” chronic pain patients, these images reinforce other perceptions about chronic pain patients that contribute to their stigmatization. Recall, for instance, that Waller and the NRC describe the returning serviceman as angry, bitter, and resentful. Newsweek’s cover image perpetuates the association of anger and bitterness with chronic pain sufferers. Unusually pale-skinned and grimacing, left hand raised to her temple, Newsweek’s cover

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girl signifies an individual overcome by bodily sensations in much the same way the veteran is described as overly emotional. The bright red hair of this particular cover girl invokes additional negative impressions associated with pain. She implies that chronic pain subjects—as suggested by the stereotypes typically assigned to their red-headed counterparts—may be “quickto-anger” or “hot-tempered.”16 Perhaps such associations could be ignored or overlooked if they stopped there, but of the nine chronic pain patients pictured alongside the various feature articles, four of them are undoubtedly redheads, another has what appears to be dark auburn hair, and two are wearing red clothing; two others are ethnic, a consideration whose relevance will become evident momentarily. Privileging the color red as a signifier for chronic pain is a prominent strategy in many popular and journalistic images, such as the red bull’s-eye and uppercase red lettering adopted for the word “pain” in the December 5, 1976 Seattle Times cover and the transformation of a pain-free blonde woman into a pain sufferer whose hair, skin, and teeth alike take on a red hue in the August 31, 1980 cover of Parade Magazine. One way to interpret these images is to conclude that chronic pain subjects (like their originary veteran counterparts) are undisciplined, unruly, and out of control. But the color red also alludes to heat, fire, and rage, all of which echo or at least gesture toward Waller’s assertion that the soul of nearly every returning soldier contains “a core of anger,” a “bitterness” that rises to the level of a “consuming flame that sears [the] soul and burns [the] body,” and he tells us the “disabled” or permanently injured veteran is the bitterest of all.17 To help explain the significance of these observations, I must briefly return to a discussion of the biomedical paradigm shift that set into motion these changing conceptions of individuals living with chronic pain.

Stereotypes and Disease Concepts Initiated primarily by John J. Bonica and aided in part by two other physicians, William K. Livingston and Henry Knowles Beecher, this biomedical shift is, I believe, heavily influenced by the images and discourses that were circulating during the 1940s about the returning Second World War veteran as found in the Waller and NRC texts. The entrenched beliefs about veterans, and particularly about wounded veterans, provide convenient terms for perceiving and describing the condition of these individuals who will eventually be categorized as “chronic pain sufferers.” As the following argues, conceptions about these two subject categories ultimately collapse into one another. Since Livingston and Beecher play relatively minor roles in the establishment of algology as a recognized medical discipline, and since Bonica has been dubbed by his colleagues as the “Father of Pain Medicine” (he did, after all, found an international society for the study of pain and travel both nationally and internationally in an effort to “sell” his ideas about the most effective forms of treatment),18 I will for the most part confine my observations to Bonica’s efforts. It is important to remark, however, that each


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of the physicians who were instrumental in the reconceptualization of pain became interested in the notion of chronic pain management as members of the military, and primarily as a result of their experiences treating wartime casualties.19 As such, they would likely have been exposed to the type of indoctrination espoused by Waller and the NRC (the NRC text was published predominantly for servicemen). But Bonica (as well as the other physicians mentioned) also embodies the nice “well-set gentleman” who gains his knowledge about the war by “reading communiqués,” as well as the officer who works himself into “nice safe jobs” (two categories of individuals identified by Waller as some of the most likely targets for the veterans’ wrath).20 If one accepts Waller’s assertions, then it would seem highly likely that Bonica must have experienced the veteran’s anger firsthand. Although not clearly evident in any of his written accounts, one can imagine how aggrieved he must have felt when faced with such hostility, whether real or imagined. It just may be that Bonica’s conviction concerning the wounded veteran’s major psychological and severe emotional problems21 is founded upon his indoctrination by the likes of Waller and the NRC. At the very least, the veteran’s “refusal” to get well challenges Bonica’s claims to have mastered the ability to “manipulate” persons to do “anything” he wants done.22 But the question remains: what if these accounts are incorrect and the veteran isn’t angry? The results are hardly distinguishable, for these physicians and the rest of the citizenry assume that he is; their interactions with and perceptions of the veteran are mediated by such discursive and symbolic constructions. Even if we assume that these physicians were not targets of their patient-veterans’ wrath (which is quite likely), it can nonetheless be concluded that the physicians were angry, bitter, or at the very least perplexed by their patients’ “refusal” to get well. The goal of medicine is, after all, to heal or cure the ailing body, and as the NRC makes clear, the veteran must do his part in the healing process. Ultimately then, the “symptomatology” of anger and bitterness assigned to veterans and to chronic pain patients in general is likely as much a result of physicians projecting their own “unreasonable” affect onto their patient-veterans as it is their patients’ actual condition. Other specific and consistent symptoms associated with chronic pain that have been designated “unruly” and therefore in need of control are similarly derived from stereotypes circulating about returning servicemen. But stereotypes of the wartime enemy also enter the equation. As already noted, Waller and the NRC construct the veteran as an alien in his homeland, a significant step toward establishing his “Otherness.” But Waller crystallizes this move when, during a discussion of the curious absence of the wartime enemy from the list of likely targets for the veteran’s anger, he asserts that “a strange bond of sympathy between sworn enemies is common.” He explains: “In terms of experience, training, temperament and generalized attitudes the soldier may begin to feel that he has more in common with the enemy soldier than with the people back home.”23 In combination then, these contentions effectively situate the veteran as the wartime enemy’s double who becomes endowed with similar characteristics, especially those stereotypes assigned during the

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war. As occurs with other stereotypes, these racialized characteristics are also appropriated into the medical discourses about chronic pain, adding to the stigmatization of chronic pain patients. John W. Dower has written rather extensively about the influence of “race hates” for all combatants involved in the Pacific War, describing the Second World War as a “race war, [that] exposed raw prejudices and was fueled by racial pride, arrogance, and rage on many sides.” Dower is quick to qualify this claim by admitting that the racism of Second World War was merely one aspect—albeit a critical one—of a war that was many wars “occurring at different levels and in widely separated places.”24 My primary focus here, as for Dower, is this racial aspect of the battles fought on the Pacific Front during the Second World War, and, more precisely, the stereotypes, the racist code words and imagery mobilized to help justify the war in Asia. Unlike Dower, however, I am interested in what happens to the anger mobilized by such race prejudices when the war concludes and fear of pan-Asian unity begins to fade. Clearly, Waller and the NRC exploit the national fear of the wartime enemy for establishing the ethos and pathos of their respective texts. Like the circulating stereotyped imagery of the Japanese, the wounded veteran is characterized as someone who has experienced a reversion; he returns to the country as an inherently “inferior” individual who is best understood in terms of primitivism, childishness, and collective mental and emotional deficiency.25 Significantly, Bonica’s and Livingston’s wartime experiences were limited to the war in Asia, and Beecher spent a great deal of time in the Pacific as well. As military men, they were all exposed to military propaganda about the wartime enemy, just as they were conditioned by the likes of Waller and the NRC to expect similar behaviors and characteristics from the wounded soldier. The NRC also insists that “sickness takes [the veteran] out of the race in a physical sense,”26 an assertion that could be understood to have a rather benign meaning, for example, participation in the general activities of daily life. On another level, the term race as used by the NRC can also be understood as a concept bound up with those of normality and progress, suggesting an entirely different meaning. Douglass Baynton and others have convincingly argued that the steady pulse of progress is threatened by “abnormality,” a concept that has its roots in nineteenth-century thinking.27 In this sense, the NRC’s warning can be understood to suggest that sickness takes the veteran, and his “chronic pain patient” progeny, out of the human race. As long as the veteran and the chronic pain patient refuse to get well they will be marked as deviant, and as long as they are marked as deviant they will be imaginatively excluded from the “civilized” and productive human race. Under such circumstances, whatever physical, emotional, and psychological consequences of war the wounded soldier is attempting to deal with become overdetermined. It seems hardly surprising to discover, then, that the medical pain specialist recycles the stereotyped images of the Japanese, couched subtly in a slightly different lexicon for categorizing and classifying,


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or more appropriately, stereotyping these original chronic pain patients. In addition to anger and bitterness, the most commonly remarked “symptoms” of the chronic pain subject become not childishness, but reversion to a presymbolic state; he is said to communicate through guttural screams rather than exhibiting bestial and barbarous behavior; and instead of being labeled “mad” or “insane,” he is described as suffering a fractured state of consciousness. The chronic pain patient, in other words, becomes discursively marked as a new stigmatized and racialized category of difference.

“Ugliness” and the Ethics of Disease Language As with any paradigm shift, conceptions about individuals living with chronic pain do not change overnight, and even though the foregoing observations strongly suggest that chronic pain subjects have been perceived in derogatory terms since first classified, a shift in social values must also be set in motion before these perceptions become widely entrenched. In order to appreciate better the relevance of this historical moment, it is crucial to bear in mind that pain has not always and necessarily been perceived as a denigrating or debilitating curse. In fact, even in the contemporary climate when chronic pain is widely perceived as pathological and consequently deviant, acute pain continues to be valued. The nineteenth-century perception of pain as a warning signal, a message to the organic body of a traumatic interruption to be read and interpreted by the physician, a condition that will disappear once its cause is identified and treated, continues to this day to enjoy approbation. Acute pain, in other words, is appreciated as a rational state of being, a component of a cause-and-effect chain; it conforms quite nicely to an orderly, linear perception of the world and to the medical rationality born of the “marvelous density of perception” that Michel Foucault examines in The Birth of the Clinic. Linked to pathology as illumination to the light bulb, acute pain signals the existence of an originary, tangible object (such as “disease,” a fractured bone, a severed limb) whose “true” nature can be known. Once reconceptualized as a disease state in its own right, chronic pain loses its status as an enlightening signifier and becomes, instead, the originary “object” or “problem” to be alleviated (or, as Ronald Melzack’s treatise suggests, a “puzzle to be solved”).28 But as frequently observed, concepts (including disease concepts) and social values are closely allied. The observation that concepts and social values are interrelated is certainly not new, having been observed and theorized by many scholars. A second and somewhat similar notion that has been circulating with varying degrees of acceptance since at least the time of Aristotle involves the articulation between ethics and aesthetics. What appear to enjoy less currency, what is frequently overlooked or unacknowledged, however, are the ethical, moral, and aesthetic implications of disease language. A recent example of this aporia is evident in medical historian H. Tristan Engelhardt, Jr.’s essay, “The Disease of Masturbation: Values and the Concept of Disease.”29 Describing his purpose for outlining the common, progressive history of thinking about

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masturbation as a desire to illustrate the “value-laden nature of science in general and of medicine in particular,”30 Engelhardt problematically extends a rather generous compliment to the field of medicine when he claims that a shift to disease language eliminates the element of moral judgment found in theological language. Other scholars who have made similar observations concerning the value-laden and, therefore, violent nature of medical concepts include Harold Schweizer, who contends in Suffering and the Remedy of Art that the reduction of a person’s experience to a concept or disease is a violence, a “form of repression of the far more polyphonous, indeterminate experience of suffering itself,” and Nietzsche, who refers to the fixating and generalizing qualities of concepts as a form of “killing, mummifying, and preserving.”31 Rather than dissolving the union between disease language and ethical judgment, however, both Schweizer and Nietzsche remain silent on the topic, effectively performing their own violences. Certainly, the violent, homicidal, mummifying repercussions of conceptualizing individual experience are crucial concerns here, but no more so than the understanding that disease language—a conceptualizing practice in its own right—is inflected with moral and ethical judgments as shaped by the social values circulating at a given historical moment. Despite Engelhardt’s overt denial of the existence of an element of moral judgment in disease language, he advances several observations that clearly suggest otherwise. After claiming that to “be sick is to be defective rather than evil,” Engelhardt concludes that “the concern is no longer what is naturally, morally good, but what is naturally beautiful.”32 As Engelhardt so astutely observes here, the notion of “natural beauty” is clearly an elemental consideration of disease language, for disease language is institutionalized by medical disciplines whose primary objective is preserving or restoring the “ideal” body. Dominant social images and discourses constantly remind us that the ideal or “pleasant” body is one that is symmetrical, unified, and whole, much like certain claims about the aesthetics of art. Disease, dismemberment, and disfigurement, as signified by dominant or mainstream symbolic modes of representation, unquestionably detract from the “naturally” pleasing qualities of this notion of the “ideal” human form. The imaginary coupling between ethics and aesthetics can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle. In Metaphysics, Rhetoric, Poetics, and numerous other texts, Aristotle delineates the requirements necessary for bodies to qualify as “good,” all of which center around notions of beauty. These notions of corporeal beauty can be heard echoing throughout the ages in a range of disciplines, including philosophy, theology, sociology, and medicine, and are reinforced by an array of cultural significations. A more recent example demonstrates the longevity and pervasiveness of this imaginary coupling of ethics and aesthetics. In light of the fact that Elaine Scarry’s treatise The Body in Pain has been so influential for critical approaches to the study of pain, I can think of no better example to include here than her 1999 publication On Beauty and Being Just.33 The title alone suggests a complementarity between beauty and ethics, just as it implies Scarry’s entrenchment


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in the Judeo-Christian tradition, a tradition that has been highly influential in perpetuating this coupling as evidenced in Leviticus 21:1–24.34 Similarly suggestive is Scarry’s scholarly topical transition from a treatise about pain (which she describes as “soul-destroying”) to one on the topic of beauty (contrarily associated with “duplication,” “reproduction,” and “fecundity”). As a condition “bound up with” creation, beauty, claims Scarry, directly opposes physical pain and injury.35 More importantly, Scarry contends that beauty and creation are “life-enhancing,” while pain is “soul-destroying.” In much the same way that God forbids the presence of physically deformed individuals at his sanctuaries in the Leviticus verse, Scarry effectively precludes soulless pain sufferers from seeking salvation; devoid of a soul, the chronic pain sufferer it would seem is condemned to eternal damnation. Finally, Scarry contends that beauty “exerts pressure on us to repair existing injustices,” is “sacred,” “bound up with the immortal,” and “in league with what is true,” implying a direct correspondence between beauty, morality, and ethics.36 Recourse to sources such as Aristotle and Scarry, however, is ultimately unnecessary to illustrate the pervasiveness of the socially imagined correlation between ethics and aesthetics, as Engelhardt himself implicitly acknowledges the association. When discussing the conceptual shifts about masturbation that transpire following its nineteenth-century pathologization, Engelhardt observes that expectations concerning what should be significant structure the appreciation of reality by medicine. The variations are not due to mere fallacies of scientific method, but involve a basic dependence of the logic of scientific discovery and explanation upon prior evaluations of reality. A sought-for coincidence of morality and nature gives goals to explanation and therapy.37

Engelhardt clearly concedes, albeit tacitly, the imagined connection between what a society deems “just” and what it perceives as “natural.” Nonetheless, he fails to logically extend his observation that disease language casts judgment on what is “naturally beautiful” through to its inevitable link to what is “morally good.” Further, in remarking the “direct relation” between vice and virtue and disease and health, respectively, Engelhardt once again appears to simultaneously acknowledge and elide the articulation of ethics and beauty. As a “deviation from an ideal of human perfection, or ‘well-being,’ ” vice, concludes Engelhardt, can be “translated into disease language.”38 In so concluding, Engelhardt implicitly recognizes not only the unpleasant or painful affect of the diseased body’s corporeality, but its depravity as well, since vice, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, signifies first and foremost “depravity or corruption of morals; evil, immoral, or wicked habits or conduct; indulgence in degrading pleasures or practices . . . A habit or practice of an immoral, degrading, or wicked nature.” Pursuant to the terms of Engelhardt’s own equation, then, the diseased, deviant, unpleasant, or painful body lacks the virtue or moral excellence, goodness, and righteousness of the healthy, beautiful, and pleasant body.

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With the passage of time and the campaigns of Bonica and other algologists, individuals living with chronic pain become identified with deviancy, depravity, and disease to the extent that they have become the postmodern iconographic embodiment of suffering and, accordingly, evil. A body that “refuses” to get well, the NRC explains early in this process, is unnatural.39 Bonica, in turn, devotes decades to embarking on national and international campaigns during which he emphasizes repeatedly that “chronic pain is the most disabling disease, and thus constitutes a serious national and world health and economic problem.”40 Not only is chronic pain a disease of the utmost concern, it is, Bonica claimed in a 1983 address to the National Institute of Health (NIH), a disease that disables the greatest number of Americans, accounts for “a loss of some 750 million workdays,” and costs the nation nearly “$70 billion annually.”41 These and similar messages can be found to grace not only the pages of medical journals, but popular magazines as well, including Parade, Women’s Day, Biography Magazine, Time, Newsweek, Family Circle, Prevention, the list goes on. Embodying many anxieties of the historical moment out of which she arose, then, the chronic pain subject signifies many of the Modernist thematics that the postmodern moment opposes. She is “alien” (and alienated) and “isolated,” as a result of which she “suffers depression” and “anxiety.” Despite attempts to classify and thereby control her symptoms, her pain experiences remain personally distinctive. In this respect, she cannot be said to be a “dead” subject whose feelings are “impersonal” and “free-floating.”42 On the contrary, she epitomizes personal suffering. In a “feel good” society concerned with surfaces and images, discourses and texts, this figure, whose experiences are so internal and personal they cannot be shared through traditional discourse, serves as a reminder that the subject cannot be so easily and readily dismissed. In many respects, she is perceived as “abnormal,” “disabled,” “deviant” precisely because she feels, and this fact leads to her becoming a national iconographic figure of evil; that is, if we accept David Morris’s understanding of the ways evil and suffering have been transformed by postmodern culture. Morris, perhaps best known for his PEN prize-winning The Culture of Pain (1991), contends that rather than disappearing absolutely, evil in postmodern times—and most notably during the decades following the Second World War—has been “not so much transformed as turned inside out.”43 In contrast to earlier theological and popular conceptions that placed evil as the “cause of suffering,” “suffering becomes one of the few agreed-upon new shapes that evil assumes in the postmodern world.”44 Although it is not my intention to attempt to explain how or why this transformation occurs (Morris does an apt job with the former), I will take a moment to suggest that it may very well be related to some of the most commonly remarked features of the contemporary “spectacle or image society.” Accepting and agreeing with Jameson’s observations as I do, it seems somewhat self-evident why suffering, and the chronic pain subject as the iconographic figure of suffering, becomes identified with evil itself. As a state of being that is perceived as sheer


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depth and which is all about affect, chronic pain seems to challenge the most fundamental features of the postmodern or late capitalistic moment. This makes the failure of pain physicians’ efforts to turn chronic pain subjects into depthless, unfeeling zombies through the administration of pharmaceuticals and the manipulation of their affective responses highly problematic.45 Like the wartime enemy with which the original chronic pain patient is identified, this perceived threat to progress embodied by the chronic pain subject had to be brought under control, and the means for doing so came under the guise of a nationwide war against pain, the new face of evil.

Conclusion: Waging War Against Postmodern Evil Taking their cue from the field of pain medicine, a vast array of texts— cultural, popular, and medical—have pronounced the need to declare war against the chronic pain subject as a serious social threat. Medical treatises and journal articles, whether intended for a professional or lay audience, identify chronic pain as an “enemy other” through titles such as Defeating Pain: The War Against a Silent Epidemic, The War Against Pain, and The Banishment of Pain. Popular magazines with wide-ranging circulation among the lay public announce “New Ways to Banish Pain,” plead “Pain, Pain, Go Away,” and declare “Pain! Under Attack at U.W. Clinic,” similarly identifying pain as an evil worthy of the populace’s concerted military prowess. Journalistic articles such as the Sunday, Nov 17, 1968 Seattle Times’ “Northwest Doctors’ War on Pain,” join the effort early on and rally the masses with a steady stream of discourses and images that parallel those of medicine and popular culture, one of the most blatant of which has already been mentioned in passing, the cover of the December 5, 1976 Seattle Times Magazine. Depicting the image of a pain sufferer centered in a bull’s-eye and accompanied by the caption, “PAIN! Under Attack at U.W. Clinic,” journalists lend support to the medical campaign against chronic pain. But as happens more often than not, here the actual pain subject is depicted as the target of attack in a synecdochic substitution. Pain has become so engrained in the U.S. national consciousness as a nonredemptive state of suffering and evil that it frequently functions metaphorically in media and cultural representations to stand in for any number of undesirable states, conditions, or behaviors. Not surprisingly, the need for healing, management, or control is clearly advocated in all such portrayals. Somewhat predictable as well, the conditions for which the metaphor of pain is adopted tend to fall into one of three general categories—beauty, ethics, or economics, the three categories from which conceptions of ideal Americanness are most frequently drawn. Focusing on individuals who have attained iconographic status as symbols of ideal physical beauty, entertainment industry magazines such as Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, People, and People Weekly decry the pain suffered by various entertainers and directors brought about by scandalous media coverage, embarrassing court

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proceedings, drug addiction, and rally, more often than not, for the treatment and cure of their underlying conditions. Sports magazines, in turn, venerate the mostly male symbol of the highly controlled athletic body, as in Sports Illustrated’s article “The King of Pain.”46 Doug Christie reigns superior, claims the SI reporter, precisely because of his “surprising toughness” and “hard edge” on the basketball court. Taylor claims that Christie’s ability to “ignore” and “overcome” his pain led the Sacramento Kings to victory in games three and four of the Western Conference semifinal series. Christie’s reign as the “King of Pain,” however, is restricted to the athletic kingdom; in the lands of ethics and economics, other monarchs rule, albeit their reign is usually brief. Bill Lerach, reported Fortune magazine in September 2000, is “The King of Pain [who] is Hurting.”47 The reigning plaintiffs’ class-action securities fraud litigator who, for nearly two decades, “put the hurt” on large corporations, Lerach has recently been ostracized and castigated by the courts, corporate executives, and defense and plaintiffs’ attorneys alike; “the hurt” is now being put on him. The story of Lerach is significant for two reasons. As an attorney, he ostensibly symbolizes legal ethics. But as the Fortune article argues, Lerach is a representation of American legal ethics gone bad, inflicting “pain” upon countless representatives of American economic and corporate superiority, earning him the title of “The King of Pain” and leading to a description of him as “a cunning economic terrorist.”48 Ultimately, the underlying message of Fortune’s article is that the constitutions of the American legal and judicial systems are strong enough to not only endure but also counter such an attack; no matter how pervasive and enduring the “pain” inflicted, the American ethical body will always prevail in its fight against pain. In so doing, the healing powers of “just” ethical action will ease the suffering in the economic kingdom as well. Significantly, none of these “Kings of Pain” exhibits the symptoms of that most dreaded and feared of late twentieth-century pain syndromes— economic “deflationitis.” Headlines provide constant reminders that no one or nothing is exempt from this rapidly spreading and painful disease that burns, stings, and cramps 49 the proverbial pocketbook or bank account, striking the “land of plenty” where it hurts most. “Hospitals Feel the Pain” (Business Week July 14, 2003), workers across the nation experience “Labor Pain” (The New Republic September 29, 2003), even the big package delivery companies FedEx and UPS suffer from “Parcel Pain” (Barron’s April 21, 2003), while governmental agencies feel “The Pain of Transition” (Governing December 2002) to newly elected officials. Several savvy marketers appropriate the healing role of the pain physician, offering alleged treatments or cures for “Easing the Pain of a Pay Drop” (Business Week 2001), “Soothing the Pain of Soaring Power Prices” (Architectural Record 2001), and more generally “Easing the Pain” (Money 2000).50 Striking at the heart of those things America holds most dear—its symbols of ideal beauty, ethnics, and economics—these messages imply that this is not how life should be . . . especially in America. Each example covertly suggests the disease-like


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nature of the pain being suffered; not only are the symptoms for each condition identified, but their interrelation in terms of a recognizable causal mechanism is also alleged. More importantly, the disease can be treated, healed, or managed by those “sufferers” who exhibit qualities equated with ideal “Americanness”—ideal physical bodies in terms of performance and/or beauty, ideal ethical bodies, and ideal bodies of financial success. The primary message of clinical and cultural representations, then, is that “true” or “ideal” Americans will and must learn to control their responses to pain. Despite, or because of, the failure of scientific, clinical, and technological therapeutic intervention, the pain patient becomes responsible for healing herself. In the end, medicine’s failure becomes the patients’ failure such that the patient becomes a postmodern visage of evil and effectively ostracized from society. It seems then that if Nietzsche were alive today, even his faithful, clever companion would be re-signified as Kujo, and he would need to be euthanized.

Notes Numerous individuals have been instrumental in the development of my ideas for this article, including Gregg Lambert, Susan Edmunds, Sarah Russo, and Karen Hall. I wish to thank each of them for their generosity and patience. Additionally, I am grateful to the editors of “The Future of Flesh” for their thoughts on the first draft of this chapter, the anonymous reviewers at Literature and Medicine who provided invaluable feedback on a related article, and the audience members and panel participants at the “Flesh Made Text Conference” whose questions and comments on a very early and partial draft of this chapter proved extremely useful. Last, but certainly not least, special thanks to the English Department and Graduate College at Syracuse University for their generous financial support in the form of research and travel grants. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Friedrich Nietzsche 249–250. Frank T. Vertosick 14. See C. S. Lewis. Ayn Rand 928–929. The term patient means, etymologically, sufferer or victim. As such, the terms chronic pain patient and chronic pain sufferer are used interchangeably throughout the medical profession and, accordingly, in this chapter. Anne Underwood 53. Of interest is the fact that the article directly compares fibromyalgia to any “number of poorly understood disorders, such as chronic fatigue and gulf-war syndromes,” all of which are similarly perceived as imaginary or psychosomatic. Nelson Hendler xi. See Willard Waller, and National Research Council (NRC), Psychology for the Returning Serviceman. Waller 15, 13. NRC “Introduction.” Waller 13. NRC 4, 1 (my emphasis). Ibid. 136, 139, 141.

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14. I intentionally use the word refuses to reflect the dominant opinion, as expressed by Waller and the NRC, that the veteran is ultimately responsible for healing himself; it should not be construed as suggesting that I agree with this line of thinking. 15. For this reason, I tend to adopt female pronouns when referencing chronic pain patients in general. 16. Another possible explanation exists for depicting a red-haired pain sufferer. According to Edwin B. Liem, M.D., an anesthesiologist at the University of Kentucky, redheads are likely to experience more pain from a given stimulus (qtd. in Sari Harrar 50). Reporting on Dr. Liem’s presentation before the 2002 annual meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, Prevention’s article claims that researchers believe a glitch hidden deep within redheads’ genetic codes is responsible for the dysfunction [which] might indirectly stimulate a brain receptor that boosts pain sensitivity. Several issues arise as a result of these claims, none of which can be addressed fully in this paper, but which it would be remiss to completely ignore. First, it should be remarked that the descriptors glitch and dysfunction clearly mark as abnormal those individuals with red hair and, more importantly for this project, individuals who are classified as having lower pain thresholds. Second, the isolation of visible physical features as signifiers for identifying individuals prone to pain is also problematic as history continues to remind us, and will only, in all likelihood, lead to more pronounced stereotyping and oppression. 17. Waller 109. 18. John J. Bonica 70, 80. 19. It was during his service at Madigan Army Hospital that Bonica first became “exposed to chronic pain,” estimating that by the time he “got through Madigan, [he] had over a thousand cases” (68). While stationed at Oakland Naval Hospital, William Livingston was likewise charged with the care of servicemen who had received peripheral nerve injuries, and together with his colleagues Ed Davis and Ken Livingston collected what he claimed to be “the most complete records relating to nerve injuries anywhere in the United States,” consisting of the “histories of nearly 1300 peripheral nerve injury cases” (Ms. 136: B1, F22). Meanwhile, serving as an Army medical consultant on the Anzio beachhead, Henry K. Beecher came in contact with seriously wounded casualties who, he observed, complained much less of their pain than did his postoperative patients at Massachusetts General Hospital. The distinction, argued Beecher, is a result of the “reaction component,” the effect of emotion on the experience of painful stimulus, which makes pain such a complex and individualized phenomenon that it could only be studied effectively in the clinical setting (qtd. in. Livingston). 20. Waller 96–97. 21. Bonica 74. 22. Ibid. 34. 23. Waller 49. 24. John W. Dower 4. 25. Both Dower and Michael Renov observe that these stereotypes, the ones most frequently applied to the Japanese enemy during the Second World War, mirror those applied to targeted people of color throughout history. 26. NRC 138. 27. Douglas Baynton 33–57.

F l e s h ly E v i l s 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 43. 45.

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See Ronald Melzack. See H. Tristan Engelhardt. Ibid. 13. Harold Schweizer 47. Engelhardt 18. See Elaine Scarry. This verse, merely one biblical example of the coupling I discuss, reads as follows: “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Say to Aaron that none of your descendants throughout their generations who has a deformity shall draw near, a man blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long or a man who has an injured foot or an injured hand, or a hunchback or dwarf, or a man with a defect in his sight or an itching disease . . . he shall not come near the veil or approach the altar because he has a deformity, that he may not profane my sanctuaries; for I am the Lord who sanctify them.’ ” Although these contrasts are certainly apparent in a comparison of Scarry’s two texts, they are most clearly delineated in Jennifer L. Geddes interview with Scarry. Scarry 57, 23, 30–31. Engelhardt 18 (my emphasis). Ibid. 18. NRC 136. Specifically, the NRC writes that “it is natural to get well.” Bonica Ms. 118: B54, F37 (my emphasis). Although this particular quote is derived from Bonica’s address delivered to the participants of the 1973 Issaquah symposium, identical sentiments are repeated in every lecture, publication, and report relating to the problem of chronic pain composed by Bonica, and appear, as well, in the majority of texts produced by other physicians practicing pain medicine. Bonica Ms. 118: B126, F17. I am indebted here to Fredric Jameson’s remarks and observations about the distinctions between what he refers to as “High Modernism” and the “Postmodern moment” or “late capitalism” (the latter are used interchangeably with “media capitalism,” “spectacle or image society,” “multinational capitalism,” and “the world system”). In addition to identifying the major Modernist thematics as alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation, he enumerates three primary, distinctive features of the postmodern moment. They are: (1) flatness or depthlessness; (2) a sort of death of the world of appearance brought about by a “fundamental mutation both in the object world itself . . . and in the disposition of the subject”; and (3) the waning of affect. Also significant is his observation that the celebrated “death” of the subject (what he terms a “fashionable” theme of postmodernism) is, as it must be, accompanied by a concomitant end of all that is personally distinctive, including the “liberation” from every kind of feeling (and not just anomie) “since there is no longer a self to do the feeling.” He qualifies this last observation by noting that this does not suggest an utter lack of feeling, rather that feelings are “free-floating and impersonal and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria.” See, Fredric Jameson 9–10, 15–16. David B. Morris 44–56, 47. Ibid. 48. The campaign to anesthetize chronic pain subjects has entered the pop-cultural arena as well, with articles that encourage pain sufferers to “Say Yes to Drugs.” See for example, Kurt Wilson 122.

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46. 47. 48. 49.

Phil Taylor 44. Peter Elkind 190–214. Ibid. 190. These adjectives are significant for two reasons. First, they are found on the McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ), a form nearly all chronic pain patients are required to complete when consulting a physician specializing in pain medicine, thereby establishing a link to biomedical discourses of chronic pain. Second, the first two (burning and stinging) are associated with connotative associations for the color red. 50. “Hospitals Feel the Pain,” Business Week, July 14, 2003, 34. Editorial, “Labor Pain,” The New Republic, September 29, 2003, 7. Neil Martin, “Parcel Pain,” Barron’s, April 21, 2003, 21. Thomas R. Davis, “The Pain of Transition,” Governing 16. 3 (2002): 64. Charles J. Whale, “Easing the Pain of a Pay Drop,” Business Week, April 2, 2001, 30. Lindsay Audin, “Soothing the Pain of Soaring Power Prices,” Architectural Record 189. 2 (2001): 195–196. Jeanne Lee, “Easing the Pain,” Money 29. 12 (2000): 179–180.

Bibliography Audin, Lindsay. “Soothing the Pain of Soaring Power Prices.” Architectural Record 189. 2 (2001): 195–196. Baker, Ben. Cover Photograph. Newsweek. May 19, 2003. Baynton, Douglas. “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History.” In The New Disability History: American Perspectives, edited by Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, 33–57. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Bonica, M.D., John J. “Oral History.” Ms. 118. The John C. Liebeskind History of Pain Collection. History and Special Collections Division, Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library. University of California, Los Angeles. Davis, Thomas R. “The Pain of Transition.” Governing 16. 3 (2002): 64. Dower, John W. War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Editorial. “Labor Pain.” The New Republic, September 29, 2003, 7. Elkind, Peter. “The King of Pain is Hurting.” Fortune 142. 5 (2000): 190–214. Engelhardt, Jr., H. Tristan. “The Disease of Masturbation: Values and the Concept of Disease.” In Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health, 2nd ed., edited by Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers, 13–21. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Geddes, Jennifer L. “On Evil, Pain, and Beauty: A Conversation With Elaine Scarry.” The Hedgehog Review 2. 2 (2000): 78–87. Harrar, Sari. “Redheads Feel More Pain.” Prevention 55. 3 (2003): 50. Hendler, Nelson M.D. Diagnosis and Nonsurgical Management of Chronic Pain. New York: Raven, 1981. “Hospitals Feel the Pain.” Business Week, July 14, 2003, 34. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1999. Lee, Jeanne. “Easing the Pain.” Money 29. 12 (2000): 179–180. Lewis, C. S. The Problem of Pain. New York: Macmillan, 1959. Livingston, M.D., William K. M. 136. The John C. Liebeskind History of Pain Collection. History and Special Collections Division, Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library. University of California, Los Angeles.


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Martin, Neil. “Parcel Pain.” Barron’s, April 21, 2003, 21. Melzack, M.D., Ronald. The Puzzle of Pain. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Morris, David. “The Transformations of Evil and Suffering.” The Hedgehog Review 2. 2 (2000): 44–56. National Research Council. Psychology for the Returning Serviceman. Edited by Irvin L. Child and Marjorie Van De Water. Washington and New York: Infantry Journal, Penguin Books, 1945. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Press, 1974. Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Signet, 1996. Renov, Michael. “Warring Images: Stereotype and American Representations of the Japanese, 1941–1991.” In The Japan/America Film Wars: World War II Propaganda and Its Cultural Contexts, edited by Abé Mark Nornes and Fukushima Yukio, 95–118. Philadelphia: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Schweizer, Harold. Suffering and the Remedy of Art. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Taylor, Phil. “King of Pain.” Sports Illustrated 96. 21 (2002): 44. Underwood, Anne. “Fibromyalgia: Not All in Your Head.” Newsweek, May 19, 2003, 53. Vertosick, Jr., M.D., and Frank T. Why We Hurt: The Natural History of Pain. New York: Harcourt, 2000. Waller, Willard. The Veteran Comes Back. New York: Dryden Press, 1944. Whalen, Charles J. “Easing the Pain of a Pay Drop.” Business Week, April 2, 2001, 30. Wilson, Kurt. “Say Yes to Drugs.” Prevention 55. 2 (2003): 122.


Pa r t I I

A rt ist ic R e pr esen tat ions of Mu tat i ng Fl esh


6

C h uc k Pa l a h n i u k a n d t h e Viol e nc e of Be au t y Elisabeth Bronfen

A

The Apotropaic Charm of the Pin-up

s part of the appendix to his Atrocity Exhibition, J. G. Ballard includes a short piece entitled “May West’s Reduction Mammoplasty.” In it, he initially describes the “surgical challenge the reduction in size of Mae West’s breasts presented,” given that she wanted her nipples to be retained as “oral mounts during sexual intercourse.”1 He, then, continues with a minute description of the procedure of the operation as well as the adjustments that proved to be necessary after several months of healing. Yet, the piece ends on a different note, meant as a counterpoint to the clinical representation of beauty surgery. “Still fondly remembered,” Ballard explains, “Mae West was one of Hollywood’s most effective safety valves, blowing a loud raspberry whenever the pressures of film industry self-inflation grew too great. No one in her admiring audience was ever in any doubt about the true purpose of that splendid body. Yet, despite her earthiness, she retained a special magic of her own, and ended her days as a pop icon who might have been created by Andy Warhol.”2 Ballard then continues by deftly moving the issue of beauty surgery to the level of cultural criticism. “Were her breasts too large?” he asks rhetorically, only to answer, “No, as far as one can tell, but they loomed across the horizons of popular consciousness along with those of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield.” The breasts of Mae West, one might thus surmise, came to function along the lines of everyday myths, of which Roland Barthes argued that they depoliticize by depleting what they represent of their historical specificity, endowing a certain person, object, or event instead with a secondary universal, essential meaning. Following this argument, one might further surmise that the duplicity of signification at stake in the reshaping of Mae West’s breasts has to do with the fact that, in her case, the threat of an excessively present feminine body came to be culturally exchanged as an aesthetically stylized image of feminine seduction, so as to deflect the threat

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it actually contained. And by framing what needs to be staved off into a safe picture, pin-ups and glamour photography in general inoculate us, allow us to enjoy, even while protecting us from the challenge of intersubjectivity qua sexual difference they propose. Ballard, however, is concerned with critiquing the deployment of pin-up images of West, Monroe, or Mansfield in an even more specific manner, by treating them as tropes for our cultural obsession with fetishizing the feminine body. “Beyond our physical touch, the breasts of these screen actresses incite our imaginations to explore and reshape them,” he concludes. “The bodies of these extraordinary women form a kit of spare parts, a set of mental mannequins that resemble Bellmer’s obscene dolls. As they tease us, so we begin to dismantle them, removing sections of a smile, a leg stance, an enticing cleavage. The parts are interchangeable, like the operations we imagine performing on these untouchable women, as endlessly variable as the colors silkscreened on to the faces of Warhol’s Liz and Marilyn.” I begin with this passage from Ballard not because Mae West, the actress, will be the focus of my discussion. Rather, I am interested in a rhetorical contradiction that comes to the fore as we look at images of this feminine pop icon who came to stand in for excessive pleasure by advocating that “too much of a good thing can be wonderful.” My intuition is to locate a twofold response to this feminine figure of corporeal plenitude precisely by holding onto the fact that, even as she puts herself on display to feed a duplicitous cultural voyeurism, Mae West is both spider woman, who vanquishes men and stands taller than her man, demanding he succumb to her charms (I’m no Angel ), as well as glamour queen, whom all men seek to satisfy by lighting her fire.3 At the same time, in all the photographs we have of her, this icon of feminine sexuality seems to be enjoying her own exhibitionist self-display. Thus, even while, according to Ballard, we are teased into fragmenting and reshaping her body to fit our fantasies, we do so in response to the fact that Mae West has already shaped herself along the line of parodic resignification that Judith Butler has discussed in relation to the cultural practice of drag; and that she enjoys this self-transformation, to boot. It is, then, precisely the murky interface between bodily subjection to modern discourses on beauty and an appropriation of this masquerade, which is to say the murky interface between corporeal self-alienation and the exploration of feminine enjoyment, that I want to explore. In a first step, I will recall the rhetorics deployed by the traditional pinup and suggest that we see the duplicitous effects these representations of erotically charged images of perfected beauty can have on spectators—their contradictory affective charge so to speak—as the problem to which women “performance” artists in the 1980s and 1990s responded by either embracing or deconstructing this mythic signifier; which is to say by oscillating between identification and aggressive rejection. In a second step I will then turn to Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Invisible Monsters, with its depiction of an escape route from the impasse between the attention that bodily beauty affords and the depletion of the self it entails.

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The trouble with the cultural practice of “pin-ups” begins with the fact that in this designation representation and reference are conflated, given that pin-up refers both to a photograph of a sexually attractive woman or movie star, designed to be pinned on the wall, as well as to those women considered a suitable model for this type of sexually alluring image. At the same time, the rhetoric of reification employed is complex. The feminine body is turned into a commodity, namely, an image that sells, even while her corporeal presence is contained—or one might say mythologized—because it is subjected to a clearly fixed catalogue of poses and gestures. Looking at the way Bernhard of Hollywood casts Jayne Mansfield’s body to fit the visual iconography of the pin-up, we immediately notice the gesture of contortion. These are images that bespeak their own artificiality, and they do so by presenting an anagrammatic body. Body parts function as signifiers—the head tilted backward along with the arched back signify availability to a spectator; the hands resting on parts of the body to draw attention to hips or legs, or used as support to sustain the pose, signify accommodation to the codes of beauty as pose; the breasts pushed forward pacify by drawing the gaze away from the female sex, as do the legs, which stretched or bent are equally powerful in holding our attention. Similarly, the opened mouth, the heightened lips, the fixed gaze all serve to support the transformation of the body into a commodity. Yet, the object of the proposed exchange is complex. While pin-ups in the 1930s, mainly found in men’s magazines, were often perceived as lewd, lascivious, and obscene, they had by the 1940s come to be viewed as the exact opposite. Owing to their popularity amongst GIs fighting the Second World War, they were perceived as “morale builders,” both fortifying and shielding GIs from some of the horrors of war. Fully in line with the rhetoric of fetishism Freud proposes, the pin-up welded feminine beauty and glamour to masculine strength and courage in battle. As Susan Bernhard writes in her preface to an edition of her father’s glamour photography, Bruno Bernhard received letters from lonely GIs, writing about their personal dreams and longing for a pin-up photo of a “girl back home,” who would give them a reason to keep fighting. Far from supporting an obscene desire, they now had a calming effect that served to libidinize the war effort, getting men to expend their energies for the nation rather than expend themselves in individualistic pleasure. Owing to this taming, pinups in the 1950s became ubiquitous. No longer relegated to the cultural margins of men’s magazines, they reemerged as the infamous Playboy “centrefolds,” where each “bunny” had a life-story and a special month of her own, while they also appeared on billboards, calendars, as well as on the cover of women’s magazines. If a few years earlier they had helped sell a war, they now served as a diversion for an atomic age, while also helping to advertise everything from socks, to sport cars, to groceries, to girdles. Once again, at stake was the secondary, “mythic” meaning attached to the alluring feminine body—consumer optimism, economic progress, which is to say the hegemony of capitalism.

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Yet, the pin-up always also served as an apotropaic charm against corporeal mutability. Freud’s definition of fetishism, after all, foregrounds that any rhetoric of denial obliquely confirms what it seeks to deflect, setting up a memorial to the repressed knowledge in the creation of a substitute. The classic Freudian formula of fetishism—“I know, yet still I believe”— need not only refer to the question of privileging certain body parts so as to stave off a knowledge of feminine castration, which, in so doing, allows the masculine viewer to avoid confronting his own castration. In relation to the pin-up, one might say that posing the feminine body so as to foreground its artificiality presents the representation of wholeness contradicted by any bodily experience, and it simultaneously displays the perfect body as a pure surface defying all signs of mutability. Even while the woman in the image is alluring because she is equated with her beautiful body, actual corporeality is precisely what we don’t see in the image. We see only a pose and we know that this is why we enjoy these images. Or put psychoanalytically, I know the body I see is nothing but an image, that real bodies are neither whole nor immortal, but I want to believe there are bodies outside the cycle of mutability. Furthermore, I find it compelling to note that Bruno Bernhard (who reshaped himself into Bernhard of Hollywood) saw his pin-ups as a gesture of nostalgia, which had a concrete basis in his flight from Nazi-Germany in 1937. “A beautiful pin-up can conjure up deeply personal yearnings and the memory of a time and place that no longer exists,” he argued in relation to his aesthetic practice. The apotropaic rhetoric of fetishism he deployed in his pin-ups was neither directed at selling a war nor at screening out knowledge about feminine sexual difference. Rather, he sought to stave off his own traumatic memories of loss by turning eminent death into beauty. “We don’t take the image in,” he continues to explain, “we move outside ourselves, into the image, as though we were entering another world—a dream. We connect with the dream as if we had lost it somewhere in our memory, and then suddenly found it again—luminous, ageless and flawless. And for a brief moment, it is as if nothing has changed.”4 Thus, mutability haunts these images, even while it is framed by them in two senses: on one hand, the beauty of the surface is meant to fortify against, indeed stave off, any acknowledgement of death, and at the same time these photographs declare this apotropaic mitigation to be their explicit purpose. On the other hand, these beautiful surfaces contain death, because they translate a living body not just into an image but into a self-consciously stylized pose, into a complex signifier for the economic, political, and psychic exchanges negotiated over beautiful feminine bodies.

Deconstructing the Beauty Myth As one moves to the reiteration of the pin-up by women artists such as Hannah Wilke and Cindy Sherman from the 1970s onward, one is struck by the fact that they bring back into the frame of their photographs precisely the


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vulnerability and mutability that is visually and thematically evaded, though obliquely articulated, in the classic pin-up: visually because the displayed body was reshaped to appear as a perfect body; thematically because its aim was to pacify as well as to induce consumption. At the same time, both no longer subject themselves to poses dictated to them by photographers but rather self-consciously appropriate the classic pin-up repertoire of poses. Indeed, they explore the consequences of the pin-up formula’s concern with using beauty to ward off mutability (be it the trauma of the photographer, the experience of war of the consumer, or the promise of material prosperity) by making the interface between the beautiful image and the abject flesh their focus; for example, by uncannily juxtaposing the two, where the classic pin-up supplants the latter by virtue of exclusively visualizing the former. In doing so both artists seem to have taken Roland Barthes’ discussion of the mutual implication of perfection and monstrosity to heart: “Perfection is one end of the Code” he had claimed in S/Z, “insofar as it . . . wipes out the distance between code and performance . . . and since this distance is part of the human condition, perfection, which annuls it, lies outside of anthropological limits, in supernature, where it joins the other, inferior, transgression . . . the essence of the code (perfection) has in the end the same status as what is outside the code (the monster).”5 While Hannah Wilke’s narcissistic self-display brings into play real mutability, Sherman deals with symbolic mutability. The connection between their work, in turn, is that in both cases their deconstruction of the pin-up is aimed at the vanishing point of glamour photography; though in the case of Hannah Wilke, this meant including her immanent death by cancer in her self-performances, in the case of Cindy Sherman, it meant staging her body as pure simulacra, which is to say the absence of any real body. Thus, in their effort to make what is culturally meant to be invisible visible, namely, the monstrous body, both artists anticipate the feminine corpse as the logical consequence of beauty on display, of women performing and thus identifying with poses of self-display. Indeed, the consequence of performing a pose so perfectly that all distance to the code has been annulled renders the equation between an abject or dead body and perfect beauty image monstrously visible. Hannah Wilke, who died of cancer in 1993, was throughout her career engaged in an ambivalent reiteration of the glamour of feminine beauty informing the iconography of pin-ups. On one hand, she narcissistically enjoyed exhibiting her body, even while her performances were conceived as a critique of what Annette Kubitza has termed the “tyranny of Venus.” In a piece entitled Hannah Wilke Super-T-Art (1974), we see her imitating the pathos gestures of the classic pin-up, using a white sheet to cover and uncover her breasts, thus not only teasing us into dismantling her body but also teasing us about our voyeuristic desire to reshape it according to our fantasies. Thus we inevitably find ourselves confronted with her own fantasies, which are what she is putting on display for us as she ironically plays with codes of feminine allure. On the other hand, Hannah Wilke not only felt constrained by cultural laws determining the codes of beauty in such a way

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as to exclude all forms of mutable body images, but she also found herself the target of feminist attacks. “I am the victim of my own beauty,” she liked to claim, insisting that her perfect body caused others to observe and objectify her, as well as render her the target of aggression.6 Lucy Lippard, like many other women artists in the 1970s who were troubled by Hannah Wilke’s shamelessly pleasurable deployment of her nude body in her performances, called her “a flirt and a feminist,”7 “a glamour girl in her own right”8 unable to grasp that the political resonance of her ironic resignification of the pin-up resided precisely in a refusal to accept the equation between displaying one’s beautiful body and reification. To counter feminist artists’ anti-beauty stance, Hannah Wilke used an image for a poster with a top heading that read “Marxism and Art” and a bottom heading that warned “Beware of Fascist Feminism.” Sandwiched in between these two labels we see her posing with her shirt open to the waist, exposing her breasts, with a tie hanging down between them, even while she has disfigured herself by placing little plastic vulvas all over her chest and her face. Indeed, in the Starification Object Series (S.O.S.) from which this photograph was taken, Hannah Wilke argues against any simple thinking in opposites. Appropriating the codes of pin-up iconography need not mean that one has subjected oneself to a masculinist logic of the gaze, where the feminine body is always and exclusively a disempowered object. Rather, what is uncanny about these images is that they insist on making a claim for both: the pleasure in presenting one’s beauty to an audience as a form of selffashioning, on one hand, and the fact that any such self-articulation can only occur within an already existent discourse of beauty and feminine allure, on the other. Whose enjoyment, one must ask, is on display?—that of the artist (and her narcissistic pleasure), that of the viewer (and his voyeuristic desire), or both? Given that Hannah Wilke is casting her body in explicit reference to a lexicon of feminine poses, is she turning herself into an allegorical figure, or is she appropriating a traditional iconography to find an adequate language of the body to express both her desire for attention and self-expression? At the same time, the title “Starification” explicitly recalls the word “scarification,” so as to invoke, in the sense Roland Barthes proposed, the mutual implication between what exceeds and what falls short of the code of perfect beauty. A body that is put on display, that is endowed with star qualities and thus idolized, is always also a stigmatized body. It is no longer “normal,” because it is the object of unusual attention, and as such both exceeds but is also excluded from the ordinary. What Hannah Wilke thus also calls upon us to ask is whether the body is subsumed by the pose it has taken upon itself, or whether imitation leads to the expression of authentic subjectivity. With the plastic vulvas placed all over the exposed flesh, Hannah Wilke, furthermore, also reintroduces to our gaze that which any obsession with beauty seeks to evade, namely, bodily imperfection; the scars that mar any perfect surface. Moreover, the troubling of voyeurism she thus effects is so poignant precisely because the body, over which it is negotiated, is itself perfect. To stay with the Barthes’


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figure of thought, what occurs is precisely the distance he calls the mark of the human condition. By juxtaposing a perfect fulfillment of the code with that which falls short of it, she effects precisely the distance between code and performance, origin and result, model and copy, which the classic pin-up in its perfection seeks to obliterate. Or put another way, she brings the question of real bodily mutability back into the framed image. And it is precisely the reality of mortality that then came to play such a significant role in the last of her performances, the series of photographs entitled Intra-Venus (1991–1993), in which she shamelessly displayed her cancer-ridden body, destroyed both by her illness as well as the chemotherapy that was meant to heal her. Once again, she has recourse to the body poses of the pin-up, only now the monstrous details marring her bodily perfection are part of the body itself, the scarification real, as if the death force that had always been present invisibly beneath the surface of the skin had now broken into visibility: the patches for her intravenous administration of nourishment and drugs, the spots of decay on her skin. As in the classic pin-up, the body is reshaped, yet not by virtue of artificial lighting and retouching but rather by actual corporeal processes. And as in the pin-up, these images work by adding and subtracting paraphernalia—flower pots, toy animals, gain in weight, loss in hair. Yet, till the end we also recognize the narcissistic pleasure Hannah Wilke had with her own self-representations. While her mother had been dying of breast cancer, Hannah Wilke had taken hundreds of photographs in the hope that to image her might be a way to resuscitate her. Now, faced with her own fatal illness, the ironic resignification of the pin-up she once more falls back on—thus also, of course, returning to her earliest work from the 1970s—brings about yet another twist to the Barthean formula. Precisely because she insists, with irony and humor, on showing what is considered culturally monstrous—namely, the body in pain, the body dying—she refuses to obliterate the distance between code and performance, indeed she insists on the radical distinction between the two. While the poses are the same as in Starification, the body that performs these is now truly excessive, oversized, out of shape, marked by the loss of body parts, by the scars on the body. These are deeply humane images, both of impending death, as well as of a woman’s courage to honestly face the reality of her body, which is to say to accept the authenticity of her corporeal existence beyond narcissism. And they are also intimate images that trouble any attempt on our part at dismantling and reshaping them for our enjoyment. Instead, they challenge us to engage in an intersubjective exchange. In the work of Cindy Sherman we find a different configuration of surface glamour and traces of death violently breaking into visibility. When she decided in the late 1970s to embark on her Untitled Film Stills project— paying homage to the publicity photographs of the 1950s and 1960s—she did so explicitly in a gesture of nostalgia. As she explained in an interview with Thom Thompson, “I was thinking of general stereotypes . . . what I remembered women to be like when I was growing up. I was really looking for the most artificial looking kinds of women. Women who had pinched-in

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waists and pointed bras, lots of makeup, stiff hair, high heels.” At the same time, Sherman conceived of these photographs as pure simulacra—as authentic copies without any originals,—thus literally obliterating the distance between origin and result, between model and copy, so as to render not the human condition with its flaws but rather the perfected posthuman body. Her homage to the era of the pin-up thus emerges as a deconstruction in the sense that it exposes the feminine pose as pure virtuality, as a rearticulation of an entire repertoire of poses, gestures, and passionate attitudes without any point of reference in real corporeality. In so doing, she also, of course, ironically performs what Ballard claims the pin-up induces—namely, a reshaping of bodies—except that in her work the gesture of dismantling serves to render visible the fact that the glamorous surface of the pin-up aims to protect against the implenitude of the body, even as it gestures toward this. Indeed, in the Centerfolds-Series commissioned by Artforum, Cindy Sherman reiterates the pin-up as a performance of a deadly arrestation of the feminine body, so as to point out the “obscene kernel” at the heart of glamour photography, even while self-consciously taking the visual argument of the centerfold to its logical conclusion. These seemingly deanimated or frozen figures—quoting the gestures of the classic pin-up by lying supine, by clasping their breasts, by stretching their arms above their heads, or crouching on the floor so as to imitate a gesture of submission—give visual body to her claim that the fascination of alluring feminine beauty resides in the fact that it subjects itself unconditionally to the gaze of the spectator. The disempowerment of the pin-up is meant as a reflection of the power of the voyeur. At the same time, the demythologizing gesture Cindy Sherman performs also aims to render visible that our voyeuristic gaze is inevitably thwarted, precisely by breaking one of the rules of the code. In none of the photographs does the model look directly at the spectator. Thus, in contrast to glamour shots of Mae West, Jayne Mansfield, or Marilyn Monroe, any pleasurable exhibitionism emerges as depletion, as if the deanimated body, completely absorbed by the image and severed from any referenciality, is the inevitable consequence of the visual logic of the pin-up. In contrast to Hannah Wilke’s performances, Cindy Sherman rejects any notion that the act of appropriating material from our cultural image repertoire might fruitfully serve a pleasurable recasting of oneself. Instead, she foregrounds the destructive aggression inherent to any gesture of identification. To define or refashion oneself in relation to an already existing image repertoire comes to be equated in her work with a cannibalization of the image. The woman imitating existent glamour images of the feminine body draws all vitality from her predecessor—the model of these images—leaving her a lifeless shell. Yet, in Cindy Sherman’s reintroduction of the category of mortality into glamour shots, the one who imitates previous glamour poses herself falls prey to a corpse-like arrestation or freezing of her body into an image of her model, once she has fully appropriated that image, of whom she is merely a copy. For, according to Sherman, any unconditional identification with feminine stereotypes inevitably bears fatal traits. If you fully equate


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yourself with an image, allowing the code and the performance to conflate, there can be no independent subjectivity. To assume the pose of your predecessor means dispersing yourself in the vacuity of the appropriated corporeal image. By insisting that any identification with our culturally exchanged poses of glamour leads to a consumption of one’s predecessors and also to the fact that in the process of appropriation one is, in turn, consumed by the images one imitates as well, Cindy Sherman ultimately claims that corporeal dissolution is the ground and vanishing point of her skillful game with simulacra—though her concern is figural death. In this sense she follows Andy Warhol, whose own obsession with reduplicating glamour shots led him to produce his series of clichés or copies of renown images of celebrities, so that in the emptiness thus performed the invisible mutability haunting all glamour and celebrity photographs could be rendered visible.

Escaping Fatal Attention Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Invisible Monsters (1999) offers a third gesture of deconstructing the mutual implication between perfect beauty and corporeal monstrosity. The novel sets in with its three characters—the model Shannon McFarland, who has suffered an accident that has left her face disfigured, the transvestite glamour queen supreme Brandy Alexander (who Shanon has discovered is her brother Shane), and her girlfriend and co-model Evie Cotrell (a transsexual)—caught in a fatal embrace. During Evie’s wedding reception the narrator, Shanon, has set fire to the bride’s wedding gown, while the latter shotguns Brandy, seemingly because she takes her for her sister, and thus her rival in love. Kneeling next to Brandy, Shannon introduces the stylistic device that will hold her narrative together. “Most of my adult life,” she explains, “has been me standing on seamless paper for a raft of bucks per hour . . . and some famous fashion photographer telling me how to feel . . . Give me attention. Flash. Give me adoration. Flash. Give me a break. Flash.” 9 The narrative she tells is a scathing critique of postmodernity’s obsession with surface beauty and image. Only at the end does Shannon confess to her brother—sounding uncannily like Hannah Wilke—that she had in fact shot herself in the face, mutilating herself beyond recognition because she had come to realize that she “was addicted to being beautiful . . . addicted to all that attention” but also “tired of staying a lower life form just because of my looks . . . trapped in a beauty ghetto . . . stereotyped.” She needed “some way to get ugly in a flash,” with no turning back possible; indeed, she needed “to explode my comfort zone,” and could only do so by radically dismantling her body, so as to irrevocably escape the discourse of beauty it was inscribed by. Shanon’s confession is possible only after she was accidentally reunited with her brother, who was at the same hospital that she drove herself to after shooting herself in the face, and who, in the course of her narrative, emerges as her uncanny counterpart. While she chose the career of model, he chose to mutilate his face, and then, after having been thrown out of

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the house once his parents discovered his homosexuality, chose to reshape himself literally in imitation of what his sister looked like in the glamour photographs taken before her accident. Palahniuk thus also has recourse to the Barthean formula that places perfect beauty and monstrosity in the same generic class. Indeed at the end of her psychic voyage Shannon will explain, “if I throw off my veil now, I’ll just be a monster, a less than perfect, mutilated victim. I’ll be only how I look.”10 This paradigm of beauty—the famous model—becomes monstrous by dismantling her face, while her disfigured brother reshapes his entire body to attain precisely the alluring feminine body she now hides behind a veil. While Shane thus literally reiterates the pin-up poses of his sister, appropriating these to form his new identity as Brandy, Shannon now ironically reiterates them, mentally still identified with her status as model yet owing to her mutilated face she is now also called upon to question this code of identification. Yet, as Brandy explains to her, these veils are themselves a tease. “It’s lingerie for your face. A peekaboo nightgown you wear over your whole identity.”11 The “starification” that was her everyday existence has now been exchanged for a life of scarification. Significantly, however, the uncanny exchange between sister and brother, and with it the exchange between physical perfection and monstrosity, predominantly deplays what Georg Frank has poignantly called an economy of attention. Shannon may be addicted to the attention she gets as a model, yet she is struck by a sense of vacuity inhabiting her “looking-good game” at the very heart, and she thus feels intense jealousy at the fact that once her mutilated gay brother pretends to have died of AIDs he becomes the irrevocable center of attention of her parents. As she explains to Evie, “Just by being all burned and slashed up with scars, he hogged all the attention” (73). Her decision to imitate him by disfiguring her face (at a point when she is not yet aware that he has in fact already begun to imitate her with the help of beauty surgery) is thus initially nothing other than a further turn of the screw of her own narcissism. Far from making her invisible, her newly acquired monstrosity allows her to draw even more attention to herself; indeed she notes, “being mutilated can work to your advantage. All those people now with . . . scarification. What I mean is, attention is attention.”12 Yet she is now also able to begin to critically distance herself from her former appearance, precisely because her identification with beauty has become troubled. She understands the police photos of her disfigured body to be the logical continuation of her portfolio, revealing what was always lurking beneath the surface of her beauty. At the same time, Palahniuk has her watch on TV an infomercial she did with her friend Evie prior to her accident several times throughout the narrative, so as to demonstrate his protagonist’s slow awakening from her narcissistic self-absorption. For she now comes to recognize that within an economy of attention everyone is trapped in a reality loop that never ends. The audience present at the TV show only watched themselves on the monitors, not the two beautiful women selling their products, while she had watched only herself when watching this infomercial, and thus she


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never notices that her boyfriend was already flirting with Evie, a prolepsis of what will in fact occur. In other words, watching only herself, she misses essential clues. More crucial, Palahniuk’s deconstruction of the logic of the pin-up also takes the form of his protagonist, critically disclosing how she used to live her life as a pose. Her need for audience emerges as a different type of anguish, not least of all because it so clearly serves to protect her from her sense of the vacuity of her life. In a particularly revealing scene, we find Shannon and Evie in Brumbach’s Department Store, starring in their own personal unnatural habitat by transforming the furniture section into the stage of soap-opera scenes performed for the edification of shoppers, who happen to pass by and believe themselves to be experiencing real drama. In a similar vein, Palahniuk has the two models go to several photoshoots where their beauty is enhanced by comparison to the ugliness of their environment—a junkyard full of dirty wrecked cars they are forced to climb around, a slaughterhouse, where “whole pigs without their insides hang as thick as fringe from a moving chain.”13 Significantly, whether they are posing in their personally orchestrated real-life drama in the department store or for photo shoots in unusual locations, what Shannon and Evie talk about is Shane, the mutilated brother, as though he were the uncanny double to their pin-up refigurations. Given that Palahniuk keeps repeating Shannon’s transformation of every event in her life into a photoshoot, by imagining a photographer telling her how she is to feel, following each command “give me . . .” with an imagined “flash,” we are asked to see her as being over-interpellated by the code of beauty. As she recalls her story, she discovers that she was always nothing but a pose without a self, and as such figuratively invisible even before she mutilated herself to literally become invisible (“If I can’t be beautiful, I want to be invisible” is her mantra, but what this actually means is, “I want to be invisible, so I can’t be beautiful”). In so doing, Palahniuk reveals indifference and blindness as the vanishing point of our cultural obsession with attention. The logic of narcissism he thus deconstructs is one inherent to the promise of love contained in the pin-up’s command to reshape oneself to fit an imagined voyeur’s fantasies. As Shannon notes, “I’ll be anybody you want me to be. Use me. Change me. I can be thin with big breasts and big hair. Take me apart. Make me into anything, but just love me.”14 Yet, as Shannon comes to realize once she critically reflects on her past as a model, living an image means being caught in a “reality loop that never ends,” trapped in oneself, because one perceives the world only as a mirror reflecting oneself, and thus avoids what Stanley Cavell has so poignantly called the challenge posed by the ordinariness of the Other, or simply love. This narcissism, which equates the endless transformability of one’s body with an equally endless promise of “false” love, proves to be lethal, because it is inhuman. One of the conundrums Shannon is caught in is that you get attention as an image, but this economy also destroys you as a person, not least of all because it proves to be an addiction,

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in the course of which you will do anything to get more attention—“We’d go anywhere to look good by comparison,” Shannon wryly notes. In the “struggle for the spotlight,” she also confesses, one will even go so far as to shotgun one’s best friend. Another conundrum she finds herself confronted with is that in a world where “my body is my story,”15 a monstrous body is invisible because people don’t want to look at it, while in relation to its canny other—perfect beauty—all people want to do is to look at it. In both cases, however, the obliteration of all distance between code and performance, regardless whether it exceeds or misses the mark of the ordinary, is coterminous with an obliteration of the human, of a recognition of oneself as a subject. When in 1984 Bernhard of Hollywood became the first still photographer to be honored with an Academy award, he explained in his acceptance speech, “My aim has been to capture the human essence of my sitters and transfer it to the sensitive emulsion of film. My definition of the ultimate photographic portrait . . . is a photographic biography of the physical and mental makeup of the sitter—and, at the same time, an autobiography of the photographer,” at which point he turned around to face his photographs of Monroe, Gable, Dietrich, and others and simply said “thank-you,” so as to acknowledge those who posed for him. For Chuck Palahniuk, writing at the end of the twentieth century, the pin-up has become the trope par excellence for a totally self-absorbed narcissistic culture based on an avoidance of the humanness of the other. If the 1950s pin-up served a consumer ideology, selling both a Second World War and a postwar belief in the American dream, Palahniuk’s critique is aimed at an ideology, where the beautiful body on display sells nothing less than “me”; where the surplus value at stake is neither money nor nationalism, but rather attention, and the narcissistic love this promises. Yet, in contrast to Hannah Wilke, who could only embrace the mortality written onto her body in her Intra-Venus Series, and in contrast to Cindy Sherman, whose Center-Folds remain caught up in performing the emptiness of glamour photography, Chuck Palahniuk ends on the note of restitution. Shannon, in fact, finds a viable way out of her “looking-beautiful game.” Early on in the text, while they were both at the hospital, Brandy had tried to convince Shannon that reshaping one’s body was a form of rewriting one’s identity, and indeed, Shannon discovers that transforming your life into a story proves to be a form of healing. “Who I was before the accident is just a story now,” she tells herself. “What I need is a new story about who I am.”16 Yet, significantly, her escape from the impasse of the fatal attention beauty affords is in fact to relinquish the narrative “my body is my story,”17 and doing so precisely with the help of a radical repudiation of the body. This liberation from lethal narcissism is, moreover, coterminous with an acceptance of love for her uncanny double; for the brother who has now fully obliterated the distance between the copy he has turned his body into and his model, Shannon MacFarland, whose beautiful body has irrevocably vanished. In the concluding scene of the novel, a final exchange


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takes place between brother and sister and the monstrous perfection they both embody that brings acknowledging the humanity of the other back into the frame. Shannon visits her brother in the hospital where he is being treated for the gunshot he received from Evie, and while he is still unconscious from the anesthesia, she offers him a gift of love. Given that he looks more like her than she can ever remember looking, she bestows upon him her identity, so that he can now be Shannon McFarland, the famous model, in her stead. “Be the new center of attention,” her speech act declares, “Be a big success, be beautiful and loved and everything else I wanted to be.” Giving away her life—by giving away an identity irrevocably tied to bodily beauty—is a way for her to prove to herself that she can exit from the endless loop of narcissistic self-absorption: “I am giving you my life to prove to myself I . . . can love somebody . . . completely and totally.”18 While her future resides in embracing the ordinary, relinquishing her veils, having her identity no longer tied into her image, her hope resides in knowing that she is no longer avoiding love.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Ballard 181. Ibid. 184. Ibid. 112. Bernhard 14. Barthes 71. Kreuzer 103. Qtd. in Kreuzer 37 Qtd. in Kreuzer 105. Palahniuk 13, 19. Ibid. 279. Ibid. 112. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 241. Ibid. 266. Ibid. 259. Ibid. 224 Ibid. 259. Ibid. 253.

Bibliography Ballard, J. G. The Atrocity Exhibition. London: Flamingo, 1993. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang, 1970. Bernard, Susan. Bernard of Hollywood. The Ultimate Pin-up Book. Köln: Taschen, 2002. Cavell, Stanley. “The Avoidance of Love: Ra Reading of King Lear.” Must we mean what we say. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Kreuzer, Stefanie, ed. Hannah Wilke. Unterbrochene Karrieren 1940–1993. Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, 2000.

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Palahniuk, Chuck. Invisible Monsters. New York: Norton, 1999. Poschardt, Ulf. Archeology of Elegance. 20 Jahre Modephotographie. München: Schirmer und Mosel, 2002. Schjeldahl, Peter und Els Barents. Cindy Sherman. München: Schirmer und Mosel, 1987. Tuska, Jon. The Complete Films of Mae West. New York: Citadel, 1973.

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E y e , Age nc y, a n d B odi ly Bec om i ngs: P roc essi ng Br e a st C a nc e r i n a n d t h rough I m ages Katve-Kaisa Kontturi

In the beginning, images were meant to be tools with which I could draw myself in positions that would have been otherwise impossible. While I was taking the pictures, however, their function changed. I then realized that images helped me to reflect my experiences and that I was able to use them more consciously as part of a self-examination process.1 —Helena Hietanen on making Sketches I realized with horror that my body was not made of photographic paper, nor was it an image, or an idea, or a psychic structure . . . it was made of blood, bones and tissue.2 —Jo Spence, after having been diagnosed with breast cancer

W

hat connects these epigraphs is that they touch upon the medium of photography and tie it to the experiences of a changing body, in both cases prompted by the same reason: breast cancer. Whereas the sculptor Helena Hietanen came to understand the usefulness of taking photographs in processing breast cancer, the British artist and photo therapist Jo Spence perceived almost the opposite. Despite Spence’s professional background, she discovered that her body was far from being just a piece of photographic paper, and thus she felt the need to point out the restrictiveness of this representational system in relation to bodily experiences.3 Weaving the two approaches together, I intend to analyze the process of experiencing breast cancer in and through images. Sketches (1999), the series of photographs the Finnish artist and sculptor Helena Hietanen4 arranged to be taken in order to process her changing body, forms the basis of my study. This series was photographed by Eva Persson just before Hietanen was to go through the so-called tram-flap surgery in which a new pair of breasts would be made from her abdominal flesh. By then, she had already had a mastectomy, and had purposely gained weight

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K a t v e -K a i s a Kon t t u r i

for the reconstructive operation. Sketches became something that it was not meant to be in the first place: a therapeutic process. In some ways, this was to be anticipated. As the photo therapist Rosy Martin maintains, all art therapy rests on the idea that nonverbal, visual symbolic representation can help the patient create a connection to the sensory-based experiences s/he wants to work with. This connection occurs because visual representations do not interrupt and distort experiences in the same way as verbal expressions do. Some therapists even claim that visual representations that are produced in art therapy arise straight from the unconscious.5 From the poststructuralist viewpoint of art history and visual studies, art therapy does not put enough emphasis on the cultural forces that are always involved in shaping experiences. It is precisely these cultural forces that I will concentrate on when analyzing the visual culture in and through which Hietanen processes her breast cancer experiences. Although I share art therapy’s interest in processing bodily experiences through art, I am convinced that there are no “pure” experiences to be accessed via art.6 Thus, in this essay, I will work on the following questions: To which image traditions does Hietanen’s art (therapy) process relate? What kinds of experiences do these image traditions empower and enable? How do different images put the breast cancer body in motion and how are the experiences shaped in this cultural movement? And, finally, how does Hietanen use and even transform these traditions in her Sketches? For traditions are not only restrictive but participate in creating new spaces as well.7 Focusing on visual culture does not have to result in abandoning the material aspects of experiencing breast cancer. As Susan Bordo eloquently puts it, images are never just pictures. Bordo’s argument is based on her reflections on the eating-disorder culture that dangerously intervenes with living bodies and psyches through media images.8 It, however, holds true in the case of breast cancer as well.9 Ultra thin, barely alive supermodels may not be the first thing that comes to mind when looking at Sketches, nevertheless, ideals of Western beauty are at play in Hietanen’s work. I have no interest in minimizing the importance of Hietanen’s bodily pain by providing a cultural analysis of her experiences. To keep myself from sinking—unethically perhaps—into the fascinating world of representations, I have interviewed her several times. Of course, there is no hidden truth to be unveiled from the interviews, as there is no ultimate truth about breast cancer experiences either.10 Her words are cuts that intertwine with my thinking, giving it not just a concrete basis, but taking it in fresh and surprising directions as well. I will proceed by weaving together Hietanen’s words and images with three related traditions. They can be roughly categorized as feminist art, the canon of Western art, and contemporary media pictures. The aim of my essay is not to prove that Hietanen has consciously worked with these traditions. Rather, I propose that they form a kind of cultural screen through which her experiences both are molded and evolve. It is with them that her body is in a constant state of becoming, in a process of transformation into something new.11

E y e , A g e nc y, a n d B odi ly B e c om i ng s

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Transforming the Gaze/The Transformative Gaze During at least the last two decades, as a response to the famous 1975 text on the male gaze by film theorist Laura Mulvey, a vast number of feminist visual theorists have concentrated on analyzing the dynamics of the gaze. At the beginning, studies seemed to repeat persistently the same depressive logic: women(’s bodies) are helpless victims of an objectifying, even violent, male gaze. Lately, theorizations of the gaze have turned toward a more multidirectional and moving understanding in which gendered compositions of the gaze are more often flexible than fixed.12 Most recent studies have abandoned negative and nihilistic attitudes toward the gaze and introduced various opposing tactics such as returning, revisioning, or queering the gaze.13 Practices of contemporary art run parallel to theoretical discussion: the gaze is one of the leading themes especially in feminist art.14 Thus, the gaze debate—both in its theoretical and material–visual intensities—is certainly an important plane on which Hietanen’s bodily experiences take shape. According to Hietanen, the series Sketches was taken because she wanted to have an opportunity to look at her own body in the same way that she would look at someone else’s. In her words, the camera worked as her “other eye.”15 Hietanen’s view relates to what Kaja Silverman has conceptualized as the specular nature of identity—an identity profoundly based on being seen.16 As Susan Sontag asserts, it is first and foremost the camera and particularly still lifes that have the greatest impact on how we experience our specularity: “we learn to see ourselves photographically.”17 Both the images of high art and popular media are part of the culture of specularity. In her partly autobiographical book Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer, Jackie Stacey writes about her desire to be photographed when she was a cancer patient. She relates this need to “before-and-after pairings,” a typical form of representing femininity in, for example, women’s magazines.18 In the “pairings,” the photographic gaze seals the change and reassures the appropriateness of the new appearance, thus entailing the idea of controlling a body with the gaze of the camera. In this gendered, binary logic, the body becomes unruly, formless, even rebellious feminine matter that threatens the masculine law and order and, consequently, must be put under control by the mind/eye. Therefore, the uncontrollably proliferating, cancerous female body is a double threat.19 For Stacey, photographs of her initially sick and eventually healthy body were to be evidence of her disease. Despite her efforts, however, seeing did not equal knowing. In the picture that was taken when she was seriously ill, without knowing it, she looks healthy and happy. And posing bald after the chemotherapy, she looks ill but is actually healthy. In the end, Stacey’s “before-and-after” combination shows an apparent mismatch between appearance and bodily condition. The idea of “pairings” did not work for Hietanen either. First, after the surgery, Hietanen was too sick—in a bad physical condition and depressed—to have herself photographed again. Second, there was nothing to be sealed; the change was not over yet. Thus,

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instead of following the logic of “before-and-after pairings,” Hietanen and Stacey turn their back on the idea of “a successful makeover” and its controlling discourse. Although Hietanen seems to resist the idea of controlling the body with the gaze of the camera, she is fascinated by the peculiar distance it provides. She explains that with the photographs, she could distance herself from her feelings and emotions and return to them by using Sketches as the starting point for further visual self-investigation: “[It was] the kind of distance that when you go further off, at the same time you come closer . . .”20 Even though the camera was in a professional photographer’s hands during the photo session, Hietanen speaks of it as if it were attached to her own body; the camera was her “other eye.” As Spence puts it: “my body was completely out of my control. Photographing gave me a kind of power—the power of the observer in my own history.”21 In considering this comment, let us look at a certain take of Sketches, the close-up of Hietanen’s eye (see figure 7.1a). What kind of bodily perceptions might the gentle look of the image evoke? What kind of a relation does the gaze establish between the eye/I and the body? For me, the look in the photograph bears no resemblance to the objectifying, classifying medical gaze of examination rooms and laboratories. Nor does it encompass the gaze of the connoisseur attempting to detect whether a certain historic masterpiece depicts breast cancer or not. Take, for example, Michelangelo Buonnarroti’s marble sculpture “Notte” made for the tomb of Giuliano de’Medici between the years 1520 and 1534, as well as Rembrandt van Rijn’s painting Bathing Bathsheba, produced in 1654. Both have received considerable scientific attention because the female figures they represent have breast malformations that are suspected to be signs of cancer.22 New visual technologies have only enhanced the possibilities of these approaches. For example, a case study on the Internet site of “Digital Michelangelo Project,”23 run by the University of Stanford, includes close-ups of Notte’s marble breast photographed from every possible angle, with specific computer runs attached to the images in order to point out the depressions and lumps.24 It convincingly demonstrates the power dynamics inherent in the medical gaze. Without taking into account the whole figure or any of the cultural intensities that the sculpture embodies, the gaze violently cuts the body in separate, yet handy, pieces to be further investigated. In Sketches, there are two other shots that approach the definition of a close-up: the image of Hietanen’s upper body, in which she lies prone on the floor, showing the void that the cutaway breast has left behind (see figure 7.1b), and another depicting her hands. The point of view of these pictures, I would claim, clearly departs from that of the medical gaze; they do not aim at classifying the body as healthy or not. The gaze is neither penetrating nor intrusive. The implicit way of looking is not at all controlling or mortifying by nature, but rather understanding and gently approving. In fact, it could be described as a benevolent and healing eye—a definition given by Spence to the caring eye of a photo therapist.25

(a)

(b)

(c)

Figure 7.1a, b, and c

Helena Hietanen Sketches (1999).

Source: Color photographs by Eva Persson

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Yet, close-ups are rare in the visualizations of breast cancer. For example, Art.Rage.Us., a book on art and writing by women with breast cancer, does not introduce a single close-up of any body part—probably to avoid the implications of the medical gaze.26 However, in feminist art, close-ups have been used as a tactic to challenge and break the power of the phallic. In her analysis of Mona Hatoum’s video installation “Corps étranger” (1994), Ewa Lajer-Burchardt argues that by surrounding the viewer with extreme close-ups of her organs (for example, her eye, lips, vulva) the artist succeeds not only in returning the gaze but also in changing its dynamics altogether. The organs or body parts are not captured or paralyzed by the photographic gaze; on the contrary, they are constantly moving toward the viewer. In Hatoum’s installation, the camera is not a tool for distancing oneself but for getting closer, and for undoing the male, medical, and phallic gaze—as it is in Hietanen’s work. Compared to the computer scans of the marble breast in Michelangelo’s Notte, which depict the breast and nothing else, Hietanen’s pictures are not at all tightly cropped; her healing camera eye does not dismember the body. The camera and the body are not in juxtaposition. The eye in the picture looks back and communicates. The same transformative gaze is repeated in the photo in which Hietanen lies on the floor. The connection between Hietanen and the viewer is accentuated by the viewing eye that is almost at the same level with the female body, instead of looking down at it in a controlling manner. This composition is comparable to a picture that presents a woman in a prone position undergoing an alternative Chinese medical treatment. Both Spence—who curated the exhibition in which the photo was displayed—and Stacey have suggested that this particular nonhierarchical setting challenges the medical expert gaze.27 Zigzagging in and through image traditions reveals that the gaze does not always objectify the body. The controversy emerges when the gaze is separated from the body, when the gaze looks down on the body. The gaze as a part of the bodily dynamic, directly involved in the experiences of breast cancer, solves the controversy. In Hietanen’s Sketches, the camera is not an extension of the body; it is interwoven with the experiences of the body. It is a transformative gaze that partakes in the transformation of the body.

Expressing the Flesh in Pain Her eyes are shut; she cannot see. Her mouth is open, but full of flesh— her tongue seems to fill in all the space (see Figure 7.1c). The suffocating, repressing atmosphere that the image evokes articulates a great deal. It speaks powerfully of the difficulty of expressing the pain the flesh has experienced. For it is Hietanen’s flesh—her own tongue—that she appears to be choking on. Yet, her pose is not a cultural tabula rasa. It is, therefore, interesting to look at different picture traditions that, if not actually then virtually, take part in her bodily becoming.28 In this case, it is worthwhile to reflect on what might be called an iconography of yelling out one’s pain. The Scream (1893) by the Norwegian


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fin-de-siècle artist Edward Munch is a world famous painting in which one’s agony is expressed through an open mouth.29 What is obvious, however, is that regardless of its Scandinavian origins, its cultural context is quite different from that of Sketches. The Scream relates to a changing, modern, urban, and secular culture that offers too many stimuli, creating an environment of instability, which the figure at the center of the composition experiences as horrifying. It is the threatening, swelling landscape that seems to fold over him, put him under pressure, and thus make him scream. Although the painting’s main figure is androgynous, the figure has been suggested as standing for intellectual suffering—that is, melancholy—associated at least from the Renaissance onward with masculinity, and, to be more precise, with male genius.30 Even though The Scream portrays mental suffering and not women’s bodily pain, it still encourages the vocal expression of one’s agony, which puts it in dialogue with emancipatory feminist art. One of the major objectives of feminist art has indeed been to create a space for reflection on women’s private, often bodily, experiences that have not found a place in the official canon. The American artist Judy Chicago, for example, has consistently worked with the theme over the decades. Her work Birth Tear/Tear (Birth Project, embroidery on silk by Jane Thompson, 1982) converses visually with Munch’s piece and touches upon Sketches thematically.31 The subject of the work is a woman going through a painful labor. She lies on her back, holding her legs tightly to push better. Mouth open, she groans out her bodily pain. The surrounding space is filled with dense waves or folds. Unlike in The Scream, they are not clearly separate from the central figure. In Birth Tear/Tear, the figure gives birth to the folds. The forces that move through her body, expressed as folds coming out of her mouth and her vagina, seem to split her in half. Whereas in The Scream, folds put pressure on the main figure, in Birth Tear/Tear, the woman is the fold. Thus, Chicago’s piece strongly supports the expression of one’s bodily pain, the desire to yell it out loud—for it is in its expression that the pain is lived, experienced. If there are such powerful pieces as Chicago’s expressing women’s bodily experiences, why does Hietanen still seem to be choking on her pain? And why, even in the image in which the mastectomy forms an empty cave or a void, does she rest so calmly on the floor—without any explicit mark of horror or rage (see figure 7.1b)? What could be the forces that have shaped the gentle accepting gaze of her camera body? Hietanen’s Sketches stands almost in contrast to Chicago’s paintings and handcraft that celebrate the natural, even primal, experiences of women as well as to Spence’s photographs that—challengingly, without filters—reveal the nude, middle-aged, cancerous body with all its blemishes.32 Sketches embodies the pain without any shock effect: there is no blood; there are no ugly scars, nothing clearly abject. It is the pictures’ calm ruthlessness and oppressive silence that suggest that the pain just has to be accepted and lived through. Compared to Chicago’s and Spence’s artistic expression, Hietanen’s style is plain and spare.

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Hietanen is also known to be critically aware of gender issues. She has commented on gendered distribution of work within the field of arts by bringing together culturally gender-specific materials and techniques. She has crocheted—historically a feminine activity—Techno Laces from optic fiber—a material generally associated with the masculine pursuit of high tech—and sculpted—historically a masculine activity—hair and cloth, which are common materials for feminist art rather than for sculpting. As in these works, in Sketches the critique is not revolutionary but rather low-key. This approach is consistent with Finland’s feminist climate, which tends to emphasize equality politics over sexual difference and does not encourage radical activism, be it visual, literal, or performative. Moreover, Hietanen’s aesthetic choices should be understood in relation to how women’s pain is represented in the media today. Her feminist position consists in revising the image of the passive female sufferer. Indeed, the misery and hopelessness of women in mourning is displayed and used as a means of depicting catastrophe in the media today. These women are mostly mourning for others, for the sake of their family members, children and husbands, their loved ones, and not for themselves, not for the sake of their own bodies or minds. Their misery brings a touch of humanity to the cruelties of the world. It is this popularized version of the Pietà tradition, in which the dead Christ is held by the Virgin Mary, that forms a kind of common understanding of what is a proper reason for a woman to mourn. This fact might also explain why Hietanen was strongly discouraged from going on with Sketches when she showed them to her closest acquaintances, including her gallerist, whereas the works in which she processed the death of her sister were well-received and even praised by the public. Hietanen’s effort to cope with her own grave illness was, thus, presumed, if not necessarily inappropriate, to be at least undesirable. As Elisabeth Bronfen suggests, historically when it comes to death and femininity, women are more likely presented as passive victims and mourners than as active sufferers for themselves.33 However, Hietanen breaks from this representational convention by suggesting an alternative mode of representing female pain. She and the former American supermodel, artist, and breast cancer activist Matuschka have both touched upon the gendered media images when speaking about their attitudes toward their bodies after falling ill from breast cancer. When Hietanen once saw an article on bullfighters who proudly stood in their underwear exhibiting their scars, she began to think about whether it would be possible for her to be as proud of her scars: “Instead of being ashamed of my scars, I would like to see them as a reminder of my victorious battle against cancer and death,” she states.34 Matuschka had a strikingly similar experience. She, too, came to think about the difference in attitudes towards scarred men and women: “When men come home from war, bandaged and broken, they are considered symbols of strength, even sexy. Could I actually show a mastectomy woman who looks beautiful, who has pride and dignity? A picture evoking not self-indulgence, but power and strength?”35


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Taking all this into account, it is a little confusing that there are several images in Sketches in which Hietanen poses, according to her, as Christ. What creates an interesting ambiguity is that whereas the crucified Christ— probably the most commonly depicted sufferer in Western art tradition—is seen principally as a passive scapegoat for humankind, matadors and soldiers actively and, more often than not, voluntarily gamble with their lives. The issue becomes more complex, but in some ways more understandable, when it is acknowledged that there are many textual representations that emphasize Christ’s femininity. He is described, for example, as a mother nursing his people. However, despite the vastness of supporting textual sources and the appeal of an interpretation that would bring together Christ and breasts, the art historian Leo Steinberg asserts that visual art representing such a combination did not exist, at least not during the Italian Renaissance.36 This absence is even more obvious in the severe Protestant image tradition that Hietanen works with. Thus, what I propose is that Hietanen’s posing as Christ is a compromise between gaining an active agency that is still culturally categorized as masculine and resisting the passive roles traditionally ascribed to women in pain, such as the Virgin Mary, the epitome of human suffering. This compromise breaks conventional gender boundaries, but is not especially radical when compared to recent studies on a feminized “queer” Christ.37 However, what is more challenging is that iconographically this pose is also an act of transcending, or at least sublimating, her personal bodily experiences of breast cancer. For, by posing as Christ, whose divine body exemplifies the potential of salvation, Hietanen becomes a surrogate sufferer not for humankind but for the women who have to live with breast cancer.38

Acquiring Agency If posing as Christ is not something that can be straightforwardly categorized as an act of acquiring active agency, Hietanen’s description of herself as a sculptor of her own flesh is certainly a confirmation of that. As Hietanen herself has said, “I thought I was like a sculptor and that it was my project to sculpt myself from the very beginning. And gaining weight was part of it.”39 By naming herself sculptor, she puts herself in charge of her bodily transformation. She is not a helpless victim of medical gaze but becomes a creator in her own right. From this perspective, her project has an appealing connection to the art of Orlan, a French artist famous for the series of plastic surgeries in which she has turned herself into a horrifyingly ironic comment on the ideals that control the female body through the canons of art and visual culture at large.40 Orlan’s process of physical transformation, The Incarnation of Saint Orlan, is consciously based on the ideals of beauty derived from such masterpieces as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Her transformation does not entail, however, Mona Lisa’s well-known smile, but her forehead, in the form of silicone implants that Orlan has adopted.41 Orlan’s project intentionally makes visible what is actually more hidden in Hietanen’s work: the interaction between visual representations

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and bodily becoming. Women are thus invited to participate actively in their process of becoming, whether the bodily transformation is self-inflicted (as in Orlan’s case) or not (as in Hietanen’s). Consequently, Hietanen’s effort to see herself as sculptor of her own flesh is part of the same (feminist) project, albeit from different sources than Orlan’s. In addition, the fact that sculpting is commonly held to be a masculine activity adds a special tension to Hietanen’s work. However, acquiring active agency is not by definition something to strive for. Jackie Stacey, for example, reminds us that the insistence on active heroism—a commonly repeated element in cancer life-stories—refers to a profoundly masculine project. She points out how a full recovery from cancer is usually described as a progression from feminine victim to masculine hero.42 Suzanne Fraser addresses the same problem from a different perspective. She writes that the use of cosmetic surgery as a tool for gaining an independent agency is doubtful because of its dependence on masculine individualism. What is of importance here is that the visual expression in Sketches does not follow the conventional model of active heroism; far from it. Heroes rarely lie on the floor looking gently at their destiny. But still, the active partaker’s role that Hietanen’s pictures present is necessary for the self-expression of a woman with breast cancer. It demands courage to engage in the process of bodily transformation, perhaps more so than in forgetting the battle and celebrating a victory. To become an active agent by sculpting flesh is not an act of individualism but of multiple (cultural) connections. It means negotiating, for example, with the medical discourse, with the doctor who runs the surgery, and with the sexualized ideal of Western female beauty that inevitably includes voluptuous breasts. Nina Hallowell emphasizes how ideals of beauty have a considerable part to play in women’s desire to reconstruct breasts after the mastectomy.43 Marilyn Yalom’s study History of the Breast provides another and, significantly, less moralizing explanation than Hallowell’s of Hietanen’s reconstructive operation. She proposes that breasts can be viewed in terms of life and death. In medical history, she argues, they are seen both as life-givers and life-destroyers, in reference to lactation and breast cancer.44 The hollow that the cutaway breast has left behind could then be understood as a constant reminder of death, not just because it is marked by disease, but because it cannot fulfil its task as a provider of life. In other words, Hietanen’s desire for a breast in the place of the scar should not be interpreted simply as a devotion to cosmetic surgery or as a need to ascribe to sexualized ideals of beauty. However, gender roles are at play here in an assumption that specifically women are to be the providers of life. Hietanen has addressed this complex question in a work in progress based on the Sketches. In this pair of images, Hietanen stands, as she herself points out, like Christ looking at her hands, first at the left one and then at the right one. To Hietanen, this gesture embodies the choice between life and death. It reflects her dilemma of whether to choose hormone-treatment, which would start her menopause at the age of 35, or to have her healthy


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breast removed and go through a tram-flap surgery, that is, have new breasts made from her own flesh.45 Yet, in the canon of art history, it is not Christ but the personification of Justice as a female figure who holds her hands in the same position as Hietanen posits in the aforementioned images. For example, Giotto’s fresco of Justicia in the Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy, reminds us of Hietanen’s gesture more clearly than the Christ in Judgement, the ceiling fresco of the same chapel.46 Whereas the figure of Justice weighs the two statues in her hands with the help of scales, Christ’s threatening gesture, and particularly his disapproving gaze, suggests that there are no concrete, “human” criteria, such as scales, on which his judgment is based. These frescos from the beginning of the fourteenth century may seem to be awfully distant partakers in Hietanen’s bodily transformation, but the clear reference to the personification of Justice, though unconscious perhaps, makes Hietanen her own judge and allows her again to defy Christian paternal authority. It stresses the fact that it is she who makes the decisions, not anyone from “up there.” The decision is not in “His hands”—a common figure of speech referring to “the Almighty”—but in hers. Still, the scales suggest that her decision is not solely that of an individual; it is based on the forces underlying the scales: on one hand, the cultural understandings of motherhood as women’s duty and gift and, on the other, sexualized ideals of beauty that necessitate well-formed breasts. The importance of the theme of hands within Sketches is emphasized in a close-up of Hietanen’s hands. This close-up could be related to the healing, supporting, strengthening hands that in themselves are often associated with those of Christ. Although the hands of God or Christ appear repeatedly in Christian art throughout the centuries, they do so principally as a part of compositions, not as autonomous entities. In contemporary visual culture, it is Christian kitsch in the form of plastic figurines and posters in which the theme of autonomous hands is most strongly carried. The styles of these peculiar objects vary from naïve and primitive to new age and differ from Sketches both aesthetically and in composition. The calm, even sacred, atmosphere of the close-up of hands may also be seen as a reference to another popular detail of Christian iconography, Christ’s crucified hands, as Hietanen has suggested.47 But the difference between Christ’s hands and hers is that her hands seem to be intact: there are no wounds and thus no blood on them. If there ever were marks of crucifixion, they have all healed. This transformation, which is, however, not visible in the image, creates an interesting connection to Hietanen’s argument of art-making as a bodily act: Being ill is indeed a physical experience . . . [And] for me working with various materials or photographing my body in a variety of positions is likewise a physical experience, and thereby close to bodily perceptions.48

In the light of Hietanen’s words, the close-up of her (healed?) hands takes on an entirely new meaning. It is linked to her will to process her experiences by

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making art, for it is indeed with her hands that she literally creates her works of art. However, to work with hands is not to diminish photographing to merely an intermediate phase before actual art-making. Rather, the camera eye is interwoven with her work from the very beginning. It has its part, for example, in the way she moves her hands when drawing or sculpting. Image traditions are not situated outside art-making; they are part of its movement. The close-up of Hietanen’s hands can also be used to unify the entire project. Sketches was not meant to be still lifes. Its purpose was not to freeze the moment or immortalize it but rather to further process it and work by drawing and sculpting—thus with hands. But to work with hands is not only a verb or a single act; it is an event. Rosy Martin states a similar proposition in relation to phototherapy: “photography sessions are not about ‘capturing’ the image, but rather seeking to make it happen, to ‘take place.’ ”49 What this performative account means is that, by posing, Hietanen does not merely converse with cultural representations, nor are they inscribed on to her body. She literally embodies them, moves, and is transformed with them in order to experience her breast cancer.50

S KETCHES as a Machinic Assemblage All life is a process of connection and interaction. Any body or thing is the outcome of a process of connection. A human body is an assemblage of genetic material, ideas, powers of acting, and relation to other bodies . . . There is no finality, end or order that would govern assemblage as a whole; the law of any assemblage is created from its connections.51

Instead of being a systematic analysis of causes and effects, my essay has zigzagged from one image tradition to another. By connecting Sketches to different kinds of art works and image types, traditions and cultural practices, my aim has been to oppose the idea of an artwork as an autonomous entity and to study how images are not just distant representations but agents deeply involved even in such a personal process as the experience of breast cancer. Posing as Christ or yelling out the pain, for example, are acts that concretely bring together image traditions and bodily sensations: to pose is to set the body in a certain position that carries specific culture-bound and often thoroughly gendered meanings. Conceived in this way, images are not something that frame the body but what the body embodies. This process works with the photographic gaze as well. In Sketches, photographing is not a medium that is superior to the body, neither is it an extension of it or a tool to control the body. Rather it is intertwined in its movement; it is a part of the body’s becoming. For the visual artist and art theorist Barbara Bolt, “the suggestion that the material practice of art has real material effects and [the idea that] there could possibly be a mutual exchange between the matter of bodies and the image of bodies, has limited currency in western art history and theory.”52 To understand Hietanen’s Sketches as a machinic assemblage is a way of emphasizing


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this undervalued interaction. As described above, an assemblage has no deep structure, nor is it a reflection of certain images but a product of reciprocal, transformative connections between human and nonhuman subjects. According to Bolt, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of machinic assemblage challenges theoretical paradigms that are based on the centrality of the knowing human subject. Bolt sees this as an opportunity to think differently about artistic practice. When approached in this way, the art process no longer favors a human body or a human consciousness.53 The images are considerable forces as well; it is in and through them that Hietanen’s experiences of breast cancer not only take shape but also come to exist. To sum up, Hietanen’s Sketches does not merely echo her cancer experiences. For the experiences that Sketches express did not exist prior to it. Yet this is not to say that Hietanen had no experiences altogether before Sketches, but that in the process of art-making these experiences have been transformed into something new. It is obvious that Hietanen has not consciously used all the images I have discussed in my essay. The images have the power to move her, to transform her without her awareness being directed to them, for they are rooted in cultural knowledge and modes of becoming. Nor does this transformation necessarily take place because she wants it to, but rather because certain images interact in a certain way. To pose as Christ weaves together forces of (Protestant) religion, Western image tradition, popular media pictures, and feminist empowerment, and it is in a creative and unexpected connection of these that her body reaches for the future.

Notes 1. Helena Hietanen, unpublished interview with Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, May 22, 2002. All excerpts from Hietanen’s interviews have been translated from Finnish into English by the interviewer. 2. Jo Spence cited in Martin 165. 3. Jo Spence (1934–1992) was a feminist and socialist photographer best known for her autobiographical works that explore the cancerous, middle-aged female body, medical institutions, and patients’ rights. Her pioneering activities include photo enactment therapy, developed with Rosy Martin. Spence’s writings and pictures are published in Spence’s Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal and Photographic Autobiography and Cultural Sniping: The Art of Transgression. 4. For Hietanen’s career, see her web pages at the Web site of Gallery Anhava http:// www.anhava.com/, http://www.anhava.com/exhibitions/hietanen/cv.html (accessed June 9, 2008). 5. Martin 154. 6. For the constructivist definition of experience, see, for example, Scott, “The Evidence of Experience.” 7. Braidotti 21. 8. For the concept of bodily materiality, see Braidotti 20–39. 9. Elisabeth Bronfen takes up the same question in the introduction to her study, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Feminine and the Aesthetic. She wonders whether a spectator looking at the painting of a dying lady should try to approach it with

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10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

K a t v e -K a i s a Kon t t u r i empathy or remain distanced and disinterested. Should she treat the represented body as the material body it refers to, and in so doing deny the representational level? Or should she focus on the cultural aspects of the represented body, such as the pictorial canon, and so on, and thereby forestall the question of the material body (Bronfen 44–45)? For the problematics of the interview method, see, for example, Järviluoma, Moisala and Vilkko 23–24, 39, 54–55. I use the concept of becoming to stress the kind of bodily/corporeal subjectivity that is in constant transformation. This Deleuzian understanding of subjectivity is clearly put by Claire Colebrook: “The problem with western thought is that it begins in being, which it then imagines as going through becoming or movement . . . Deleuze, however, insists that all life is a plane of becoming, and that the perception of fixed beings—just as man—is an effect of becoming” (Colebrook 2002, xx). The cultural dynamics of becoming as a basis of subjectivity is illustratively summarized by the feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti as follows: “The process of becoming a subject requires sets of cultural mediation; the subject has to deal with material and semiotic conditions, that is to say an institutional set of rules and regulations as well as the forms of cultural representation that sustain them” (Braidotti 21). See also Grosz’s Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures, and Colebrook’s “From Radical Representations to Corporeal Becomings.” See, for example, Gamman and Marshment’s Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture; hooks’ Black Looks: Race and Representation; Silverman’s The Threshold of the Visible World; and Kaplan’s Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and The Imperial Gaze. See, for example, McDonald’s Erotic Ambiguities: Female Nude in Art; and Horne and Lewis’s Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures. Martin 150–151. See also Betterton’s Looking on: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media, and the works mentioned in notes 12 and 13. Helena Hietanen, unpublished interview with Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, May 22, 2002. Silverman 195–227. Sontag cited in Silverman 197. Stacey 138–139. Stacey 151–156. Helena Hietanen, unpublished interview with Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, May 22, 2002. Spence cited in Martin 165. Stark; Olson 9. For the description of the project see http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/ mich/ (accessed June 9, 2008). See http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs99d-01/projects/breast-of-night/ breast-of-night.htm (accessed June 9, 2008). Spence 1995, 181. See also Spence 1995, 97–108, 114–115, 120; and Malchioldy 56–59. Stacey 207–210. For the concepts of the virtual and the actual and their relationship in Deleuzian thinking, see Colebrook 2002, 172–174. For the picture of The Scream see http://www.munch.museum.no/content. aspx?id=15 (accessed June 9, 2008).


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30. For genius and melancholia see Battersby 30–34, 84–89, 94–95. 31. For the picture of Birth Tear/Tear see http://www.throughtheflower.org/page. php?p=12&n=2 (accessed June 9, 2008). 32. See, for example, Lucie-Smith 80–99, and Spence 1995, 98–99, 206–207. 33. Bronfen, passim. 34. Helena Hietanen, unpublished interview with Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, May 22, 2002. 35. Malchiodi 58. For Matuschka’s art see http://www.matuschka.net/ (accessed June 9, 2008). See also Tasch 66–67. 36. Steinberg 376–378, 383–388. For the literal (biblical) sources on breasted Christ, see also Moore 40, 42–44. 37. See, for example, Isherwood; and Moore. 38. Hietanen’s pose as Christ converses with one of the Hannah Wilkes’s IntraVenus photographs (1992–1993). While the series of ten pictures in general handles her experiences of lymphoma, the viewpoint of the right panel of the diptych # 4, comes from religious iconography. In that picture, Wilke poses as a saint wrapped in a robe, thus acquiring a sacred and solemn, but passive, agency. See, for example, Tierney. 39. Helena Hietanen, unpublished interview with Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, May 22, 2002. 40. For details of the The Incarnation of St Orlan, see http://www.orlan.net/ (accessed June 9, 2008). See also Davis; and Hirschhorn. 41. See, for example, Vänskä. 42. Stacey 8, 10–11, 13–17. 43. For breasts as sexualized objects, see Young’s “Breasted Experience. The Look and the Feeling.” 44. Yalom 205–240. 45. Helena Hietanen, unpublished interview with Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, May 16, 2002. 46. For the image of Giotto’s Justicia see, for example, http:http://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/Image:Giotto_-_Scrovegni_-_-43-_-_Justice.jpg (accessed June 9, 2008). I would like to thank Professor Altti Kuusamo for pointing out this fascinating iconographical connection. 47. Helena Hietanen, unpublished interview with Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, June 12, 2003. 48. Ibid. 49. Martin 154. 50. The visual artist and theorist Barbara Bolt has worked exquisitely with the performative understanding of art in her book Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image. 51. Colebrook 2002, xx. 52. Bolt 168. 53. Ibid. 78–83.

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Bolt, Barbara. Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004. Bordo, Susan. “Never Just Pictures.” In The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, edited by Amelia Jones, 454–465. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2002. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992. Colebrook, Claire. “From Radical Representations to Corporeal Becomings.” Hypatia 15. 2 (2000): 76–93. ———. Understanding Deleuze. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2002. Davis, Kathy. “ ‘My Body is My Art’—Cosmetic Surgery as a Feminist Utopia?” In Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body, edited by Kathy Davis, 168–181. London: Sage, 1997. Fraser, Suzanne. “The Agent Within: Agency Repertoires in Medical Discourse on Cosmetic Surgery.” Australian Feminist Studies 18. 40 (2003): 29–44. Gamman Lorraine and Margaret Marshment, eds. Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture. London: Women’s Press, 1988. Grosz, Elizabeth, ed. Becomings. Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Hallowell, Nina. “Reconstructing the Body or Reconstructing the Woman? Perceptions of Prophylactic Mastectomy for Hereditary Breast Cancer Risk.” In Ideologies of Breast Cancer: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Laura K. Potts, 153–180. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan, 2000. Hirschhorn, Michelle. “Orlan—Artist in The Post-Human Age of Mechanical Reincarnation: Body as Ready (to Be Ready) Made.” In Generation and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, edited by Griselda Pollock, 110–134. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992. Horne, Peter and Reina Lewis, eds. Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Isaak, Jo Anna. Feminism and Contemporary Art: Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Isherwood, Lisa. “Queering the Christ: Outrageous Acts and Theological Rebellions.” Literature and Theology 15 (2001): 249–261. Järviluoma, Helmi, Pirkko Moisala, and Anni Vilkko. Gender and Qualitative Methods. London: Sage, 2003. Kaplan, Ann E. Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Lajer-Burchardt, Ewa. “Real Bodies: Video in 1990s.” Art History 20. 2 (1997): 185–213. Lucie-Smith, Edward. Judy Chicago: An American Vision. New York: WatsonGuptill Publications, 2000. McDonald, Helen. Erotic Ambiguities: Female Nude in Art. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Malchioldy, Kathy. “The Invasive Art: Art as Empowerment for Women with Breast Cancer.” In Feminist Approaches to Art Therapy, edited by Susan Hogan, 49–65. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.


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Martin, Rosy. “Looking and Reflecting: Returning the Gaze, Re-enacting Memories and Imagining the Future through Phototherapy.” In Feminist Approaches to Art Therapy, edited by Susan Hogan, 150–176. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Moore, Stephen D. God’s Beauty Parlor: And the Other Queer Spaces in and around the Bible. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Olson, James S. Bathsheba’s Breast: Women, Cancer, and History. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Scott, Joan W. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 773–797. Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Spence, Jo. Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal and Photographic Autobiography. London: Camden Press, 1986. ———. Cultural Sniping: The Art of Transgression. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Stacey, Jackie. Teratologies. A Cultural Study of Cancer. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Stark, James J. “The Breast of ‘Night’: Michelangelo as Oncologist.” The New England Journal of Medicine 343. 21 (2000): 1557–1578. Steinberg, Leo. The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. 2nd revised and expanded edition. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1996. Tasch, Jacqueline A., ed. Art.Rage.Us: Art and Writing by Women with Breast Cancer. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998. Tierney, Hanne. “Hannah Wilke: The Intra-Venus Photographs.” Performing Arts Journal 52. 18.1 (1996): 44–49. Vänskä, Annamari. “A Heroic Male and a Beautiful Woman. Teemu Mäki, Orlan and the Ambivalence of the Grotesque Body.” Nora—Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies 10. 3 (2002): 154–167. Yalom, Marilyn. A History of the Breast. London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997. Young, Iris Marion. “Breasted Experience. The Look and the Feeling.” In The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, edited by Rose Weitz, 152–161. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.


8

Fa n ta st ic 4-Body-i ngs: I de a l Gro t e s qu e n e s s i n t h e C om ic-B o ok C u lt u r e Christina Dokou

Introduction: Comics as a U.S. Cultural Index

A view of America as a culture of images,

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especially metaphors, metonymies, or mutations of the body, is not complete unless one looks at comic books. With their gaudily costumed superheroes sporting superpowered bodies and brains, and their fantastic landscape allegories of America, comics sprang from a rich ancient satirical tradition 2 via cartoon strips to evolve into an independent genre. The genre reflects pop Americana culture and history,3 aesthetic and even intellectual trends,4 a neo-mythology,5 and the postmillennial angst about transformations of human identity, the layperson’s hopes and fears.6 Most comics are still searching for legitimization because of their “unrealistic” form and theme (a fallacy explored by Thierry Groensteen),7 their mainstream lapses into literary and artistic infantilism, and commercial exploitation—since, in the words of Alan Moore, “It doesn’t matter how sophisticated they are, they’re still about men with their underpants over their trousers.”8 However, their authentic appeal and their synchronization with the American pop mindset shows in the huge and ongoing success of the comics industry. Because of its simplicity and use of fantasy, the comics image may be viewed as a Jungian archetype, a vulgate myth-like (thus immediately communicable) signification of a basic idea (that is, heroism) sprung from the collective unconscious. At the same time, as a conscious artistic effort, it reflects the cultural-political zeitgeist as perceived within itself since, according to W. J. T. Mitchell, “It should be clear that representation, even purely ‘aesthetic’ representation of fictional persons and events, can never be completely divorced from political and ideological questions; one might argue, in fact, that representation is precisely the point where these questions are most likely to enter the literary work.”9 As Klaus Kaindl notes, comics are a genre “very strongly governed by conventions,”10

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and that furthermore, as regards their “multimodal” nature: [Umberto] Eco, (1972:202) for one, has demonstrated that pictures have a code which is governed by conventions, and these conventions may be shaped by cultural constraints. This also means that the visual representation of objects, gestures, facial expressions, etc. can be interpreted correctly only if the significance of these elements has been defined in the particular culture. (cf. Eco 1987:65)11

Comics run the gamut from teenage boys’ fantasies of ghastly quality (given that “90 per-cent of mainstream readers are adolescent males ranging in age from about twelve to twenty”)12 to thoughtful artistic masterpieces.13 The only thing all comics seem to have in common is that their particular philosophy, or lack thereof, is primarily conveyed through a specific code of bodily representation, as often the illustrational background is immaterial (a tradition probably inherited from the blank squares of early cartoon strips). Still, as Sigmund Freud opined, human truths lurk especially in bad, “egocentric” art,14 while artistic quality, especially after the 1980s, is no longer the sole privilege of alternative comics. Some mainstream comics that have written history in the genre continue to evoke respectful interest even in the present age of savage competition. One of these is the 1961 book that actually “revolutionized comics . . . and gave birth to what is now called the Marvel Universe,” creating the phenomenon of Marvel Comics (today part of the colossal Marvel Entertainment Group).15 It was the vehicle for the innovative art of two giants in the field:16 creator/author, comic-book icon and Marvel President, Stan Lee, and the man who “quite simply . . . is American comics,” celebrated artist Jack Kirby.17 Its title was The Fantastic Four (FF ).18 The recent blockbuster film with the same title that premiered on July 8, 2005 as well as its 2007 sequel have given rise to much talk about aspects of the book and its adaptation, mostly among aficionados. What this essay intends to show, however, is that the unique value and appeal of the FF lies in that its characters were the first to present to their audience a new (mainly bodily) heroic form, one that challenges prescribed forms of beauty by deconstructing them with technoscientifically generated hyperbole to the point of grotesqueness. Furthermore, it wants to suggest that this new, mutated heroic model reflects the changing aesthetic and cultural attitudes of U.S. teens then and now.

From the Classical to the Grotesque Heroic Body The story of The Fantastic Four appears on a certain level artistically naive and typical of comic books: four friends, attempting to be the first interstellar travellers on a private spaceship, encounter an accidental storm of cosmic rays, and are bodily transformed by the radiation into elemental superpowered beings. Vowing to use their powers for good as a group called the Fantastic Four, they establish themselves in New York and become American icons as well as protectors of the nation, the planet, and the universe.19

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The realization of the story has been marked unalterably by the 1950s–1960s mentality of its creation time: the heroes wear demure full-body uniforms and their attitudes and types reflect a conservative W.A.S.P.-ish set. The book clearly promotes postwar era suburban values such as affluence and complacency, the space race (as the Marvel Encyclopedia notes, “The Fantastic Four are not super heroes in the traditional sense. . . . They are astronauts, envoys, explorers . . . trailblazers”), 20 vigilance against the Communist threat, and the Baby-Boom emphasis on family values, as “whatever dangers they face, they face as a family.”21 However, a particular infusion of the grotesque in the FF—whose mutated bodies are not the perfect homo sapien specimens that Superman’s or Captain American’s are—combined with the usual comic-book conventions, oddly serves also as a questioning and caricature of the above values while engaging in the postmodern anxiety of the human identity grounded on the body, issues of species versus technology, virtuality, and fictions of the self.22 After all, “the grotesque” is defined as decorative art in sculpture, painting, and architecture characterized by fantastic representations of human and animal forms often combined into formal distortions of the natural to the point of absurdity, ugliness, or caricature . . . By extension, grotesque is applied to anything having the qualities of grotesque art: bizarre, incongruous, ugly, unnatural, fantastic, abnormal.23

Thus, it stands to reason that the combination of human and superhuman, although intended for appeal, may lead to that effect. This is also supported by Rosi Braidotti’s discussion on monsters, “human beings who are born with congenital malformations of their bodily organism . . . defined in terms of excess, lack, or displacement of organs,” evoking both fascination and abhorrence.24 In fact, the malformed superheroic may be a particularly American variant of grotesque, if we accept Jean Baudrillard’s claim that the “American ‘way of life’ ” is characterized by its mythic banality, its dream quality, and its grandeur. That philosophy which is immanent not only in technological development but also in the exceeding of technology in its own excessive play . . . in the apocalyptic forms of banality . . . in the hyperreality of that life which, as it is, displays all the characteristics of fiction.25

In the FF in particular, comic grotesqueness furthermore can be seen as an attempt to liberate the body from the tyranny of classical-form concepts on which comic-book artists had been up to that point attached: the “Greek fold” on the pelvis, the foreshortened limbs and the powerful upper torso of the eighth century BCE kouroi that is duplicated in every Batman or Captain Marvel pose well until the 1990s. Given that the origin of the group lies not in some mysterious magical or divine event but in a scientific experiment, the comic raises, in the early 1960s, questions debunking both the myth of the teleological race of the species to achieve the beautiful, that is, the rationally understood self, as well as the transcendental signified of the unalterable

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“naturaleness” of the resulting human beings. After all, according to Arthur Kroker, there is a more-than-symbolic connection between space travel and the metahuman (or posthuman) self: “Maybe we are already living in another dimension of space travel: in a sub-space warp jump, a virtual reality where we can finally recognize that we are destined to leave this planet because we have already exited this body.”26 Accordingly, one must amend the comic hero’s representational code as theorized by Umberto Eco, who, in “The Myth of Superman,” speaks of a heroic-comic prolonged destiny. The mythological character of the comic strips finds himself in this singular situation: he must be an archetype, the totality of certain collective aspirations, and therefore he must necessarily become immobilized in an emblematic and fixed nature which renders him easily recognizable . . .; but since he is marked in the sphere of a “romantic” production for a public that consumes “romances,” he must be subjected to a development which is typical . . . of novelistic characters.27

The superhero, then, must “remain ‘inconsumable’ [that is, fixed, because already consumed and permanently altered by his heroic difference] and at the same time be ‘consumed’ according to the ways of everyday life” to keep the series going.28 Eco, however, oversees the dimension of heroic density in modern comics, where the fusion of, and tension between, the subversive fantastic and the conforming mimetic can create a bodily self that is multifaceted, playful, and “into” the metanarrative of its artificiality. To put it in other words, archetypes are highly complex and compacted items, allowing the possibility that their “romantic” narrative “unpacking” will lead not to some heroic resolution but to an open-ended exacerbation of their latent bizarreness. Therefore, we can speak of an ideal grotesqueness in the sense of a hyperbolic (that is, hyper-explored, extended) depiction of classical heroic beauty that, clashing with altered notions of the body and what is human in the twentieth century, reflects a prevalent existential angst.

Mr. Fantastic: Science Stretched Too Thin An examination of the portraits of each of the FF members, with emphasis on their fantastic bodies, will serve to illustrate the above concept, demonstrating also how the “multimodality” of the “hybrid genre” of comics, according to Kaindl, allows the critical reader to operate both on the level of “linguistic elements” and that of “pictographic elements” and “pictorial representations,” as well as via “intertextual reference.”29 We should note first that the number four is in itself significant. It recalls the holy number of cosmic order in several (folk) mythologies and Carl Gustav Jung’s “four functions of consciousness, or the four stages of the anima or animus” that create the mature, “individuated” self.30 Accordingly, each FF member will be shown to embody an aspect of the Jungian psychosomatic tangents that synthesize the holistic self: that is, the Self, the ego, the animus, and the anima.


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Reed Richards, codenamed Mr. Fantastic, the unquestionable leader of the group, is the prototype of the American man of the 1950s–1960s. The “consumed” hero in Eco’s theory 31 can be seen as an apt metaphor of the American self, which for Baudrillard, “Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present”—something that would explain the everyday fabulism of American life.32 Reed, accordingly, is already “consumed” as a multimillionaire scientific genius who creates an interstellar rocket, so his role changes little when his entire body acquires the ability to stretch like sentient rubber. Mr. Fantastic represents fittingly the Self, or the overall controlling “mind” of Jung’s fourfold division. As Marie von Franz says The organizing center from which the regulatory effect stems seems to be a sort of “nuclear atom” in our psychic system. One could also call it the inventor, organizer, and source of dream images. Jung called this center the “Self” and described it as the totality of the whole psyche, in order to distinguish it from the “ego,” which constitutes only a small part of the total psyche.33

In fact, stretching serves as a physical metaphor for American identity since, as Stephen Fender shows, the immigrants’ journey across the Atlantic and the creation of the a new national super-imposed identity is a staple of the “American Difference” and “exceptionalism.”34 It also stands, however, for American techno-scientific theories and capacity (a point also made ironically at the beginning of the film). In this “dreamer’s” stretching are summed the 1950s miracle of atomic energy (the atom bomb experiments cartoonishly nicknamed “project Avalon”) and the 1960s space program optimism about reaching the stars,35 democratically available to all adventurers, as shown by Marvel’s and “the world’s first ‘imaginauts,’ ”36 the expanded limits of knowledge, the blanketing hegemony of reasonable theory that Reed continuously spouts, the extension of the self through bulky exoskeletonic machines, such as Reed ceaselessly constructs in his lab, which signal not only the infantile wish of the brain for rapid maturation of the “premature” body 37 but also clearly a penile valorization, where expansion matters. In Jungian terms too, the controlling-synthesizing principle that Reed Richards represents is often pictured as the archetype of the “Cosmic Man”: “a gigantic, symbolic human being who embraces and contains the whole cosmos” and appears in someone’s dreams to herald a “creative solution to his conflict.”38 Mr. Fantastic fights by wrapping tight around his foes (or angry friends, in the film) like a giant straightjacket (symbolically restraining demented evil or rage by good reason). In short, his body is literally the cliché of the word made flesh—and a phallogocentric cliché at that (as Reed is always right—in theory). Mr. Fantastic is furthermore cast as the group paterfamilias, designating his sobriquet as a generic name to his “Fantastic” clan. He also has this dignified older look, always neat and shaven, with a reed-y body, graying temples, and, until the 1980s, a pipe. Reed is duty-obsessed (rarely eats or plays) and painfully sober—the epitome of the dysfunctional scientist. This nerd

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quality is exaggerated in the first film to the point of making him appear constantly victimized: Reed is called “the world’s dumbest smart guy” by fellow member Torch and the first manifestation of his stretching powers is characterized as being “gross,” while later he is rubberized to the point of literally losing bodily coherence and “melting.” In other words, he looks nothing like the typical twenty-something superhero, with the buff, solid body and the “gung-ho” attitude, reflecting perhaps an early sign of the turn from the hegemony of the “quarterback” macho masculine model to that of the twenty-first century “metrosexual.” Reed is furthermore responsible to a fault—literally, for the spaceship fiasco of the group’s genesis. While the typical (super)hero only reacts to the trauma of some personal or general injustice, Reed is the sole author of his own trauma, and those of his teammates (something only seen in recent pop heroic figures, such as Xena: Warrior Princess). Like the veterans that lived through the trauma of a World conflict and must exonerate for, and be vigilant about, history, Reed battles foes allegorical of the World War (read: cosmic ray assault), the Red Scare (as in the FF’s antithesis, the Soviet team of the Frightful Four), and the H-bomb (a cosmic Destroyer known as Galactus, the villain of the second film) in order to bring about this new age of prosperity, progress, and family values. This hope that all can heal is known as “comic-book physics,” where freak accidents do not kill but grant superpowers, and even an atom bomb explosion can eventually lead to good.39 Nevertheless, the cool dependability of Mr. Fantastic comes at the cost of his own paranoia, resembling his body that can super-stretch, but in the stretching loses its human shape and structure, becomes amorphous—and can constrict one to death in trying to offer a protective techno-enhanced hug. The superphallic quality of Reed’s body is also mocked by a feminizing penetrability of his faculties: he isolates himself in his lab experiments, only to be usually the one to detect or create thus the FF’s newest threat. His technologically advanced Manhattan skyscraper, which serves as the FF headquarters and is named “Four Freedoms Plaza”— suggesting the fourfold basis of the American Dream—is continuously broken into by supervillains, while his dreamed-of life is always threatened. And all that because his hubristic spaceship was penetrated by cosmic rays40 when Mother Nature decided to show the Male Scientific nous who’s boss by afflicting the male body with a feminized pliancy and softness—and making him like it, too! Finally, although Reed is the one to whom all the other teammates relate immediately, he bungles his social duties, preferring his laboratory sanctum: no matter how much he can stretch, the brain’s self-referentiality is a limited state of being. Ironically, Reed’s oldest relation is to the archenemy of the FF, the evil genius Victor Von Doom, or Dr. Doom. Typically the alter Ego of the scientist, Doom stands for the dark monstrous Other to the mythical hero, with a name that recalls mad professors such as Dr. Strangelove,41 or even J. Robert Oppenheimer.42 Although Dr. Doom’s status from orphaned nomad to monarch of Latveria (a fantastic Balkan nation)43 contrasts to the democratic, family-oriented United States and its 1960s fear of Eastern


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Communism, the Latverian prosperity suggests a kind of paternalistic enlightened rule not unlike Reed’s own leadership of his team. Doom was Richards’s college peer and rival, and it was due to their frenzied competition that Doom conducted an erroneous experiment that resulted in his disfigurement and subsequent permanent encasement in full-body armor, topped by a medieval (that is, anti-New World) green cowl and cape.44 Antithetical to Reed’s stretching, Doom’s containing armor is, nevertheless, also a technologically advanced device like a cosmonaut suit, signifying the dark side of Reed’s self-isolating vision that, for Groensteen, is duplicated by the “ ‘existential dream’ that a reader experiences when he plunges into the world of small pictures.”45 After all, for Kroker Heidegger was wrong. Technology is not something restless, dynamic and ever expanding, but just the opposite. The will to technology equals the will to virtuality. And the will to virtuality is about the recline of western civilization: a great shutting-down of experience, with a veneer of technological dynamism over an inner reality of inertia, exhaustion, and disappearances.46

Right from the start, therefore, the comic-book questions the purity of its superheroic model and simultaneously casts a shadow (embodied as well as reflected in the Lacanian mirror image of “dark-Ages” Doom) over the American obsession with the improvement of the body through technoscience (particularly intensified today with cyborg mechanics and genetic alchemy).

The Invisible=Woman: A Storm and Her Teacup The early-1960s mark of the FF comic is equally evident in Reed’s fiancée and later wife, Susan Storm-Richards, a.k.a. The Invisible Girl (subsequently, the Invisible Woman). It is no wonder, therefore, that of all the characters she was the one most revamped in the 2005 film, played by the best-known actress among those involved, and upgraded to a fellow top scientist and a prize of contention between Reed and von Doom. The name alone suggests the textbook case of woman in patriarchy, as “ ‘Woman’ is that which is assigned and has no power of self-definition.”47 The Invisible=Woman is the blank (that is, penis-less) spot, as “unrepresentable” as death on which, according to a slew of feminist critics, the phallogocentric empire of the symbolic sign is inscribed and built.48 Her role as “impressionable” tabula permanently rasa is heightened by the age difference between her and Reed: she was a twelve-year-old when she developed a crush on Reed as a graduate student, so in a sense she is also “consumed” before she is erased.49 Sue is typically “ladylike,” blonde (a hue next to invisible), and usually pencilled as Doris Day or June Cleaver,50 that is, an “invisible” original self-styled as a copy of the ideal 1960s housewife. Most ironically, the sacrifice of her aspirations to movie stardom in order to serve invisibly the greater good of her “family,”51 and her subsequent high-visibility as team lady, only reinforces

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the schema of a woman’s erasure and reinscription according to the patriarchal codes of representation. Sue’s auxiliary power to produce invisible forcefields that can briefly envelop and shield the others from trouble makes her the bodily metonymy for the sheltering home that is a woman’s oyster. Her modus operandi is to sneak undetected in or, usually, out of the battlefield, fall unconscious or captive (due to a soft heart and unsound judgment), and then get rescued by the male members of the FF, worrying all the while whether Reed (who usually ignores her pleas, thus making her twice invisible)52 has had his dinner, even when the world is literally coming to an end!53 Sue’s utter devotion and deference to Reed appears to earn her the position of the anima in the Jungian quadripartite division of the personality, that is, “the female element in every male,” especially since Jung describes the anima as essentially “a certain inferior kind of relatedness to the surroundings . . . which is kept carefully concealed from others as well as from oneself.”54 In addition, “the anima appears in her proper positive role . . . as a mediator between the ego and the Self,”55 a role that Sue fills by always easing the tension between Reed the Self and her flamboyant brother, the Torch, whom we shall see occupies the ego position. Ostensibly the motivator and “heart” of the team body,56 the Invisible Sue nevertheless also serves the model of the tainted “Eve” of phallogocentric mythos, by developing an attraction for another former foe—later superhero—Namor the Submariner, the amphibian Prince of Atlantis, and thus stands accused of betrayal by her teammates.57 This excess of primal female desire uncontained by domesticity or Reed’s “stretching” is the chink in the armor of optimistic technology that characterizes the FF, their anti-Lacanian “lack” that she makes visible. In another sense, Sue is a domesticated manifestation of the Medusa archetype, the anxiety-inducing symbol of the “castrated” female genitals58 and it is no coincidence that her invisibility is always depicted as a fading from the waist down.59 Further ironic is the fact that, by necessity of comic-book semiotics, where everything must be imaged, the Invisible Woman is never truly invisible! Usually shown as/in a white cutout, or as a dotted-line sketch (a universal signifier, ironically, for “object missing”), she remains prey to the patriarchal division of “woman as image, man as bearer of the look,”60 but simultaneously invites the reader to reconstruct the missing lady by paying enough attention to her. She is the spectre that haunts observable (ergo, scientific) epistemology. This suggestion might also be aided by the fact that comics are considered a “feminine” genre, not only because the image is considered as the sensory/“seductive” counterpart to masculine logos/text, but additionally because comics subject respectably macho males to gaudy, even garish, costumes.61 The Invisible Woman’s later 1994 “liberation”—albeit brief—from her demure 1960s full-body costume (with a midriff-less swimsuit featuring a cutout “4” right on her cleavage) may on one hand obviously serve to titillate the teen male audience, but on the other provide her with enough provocative “naughtiness” to gain central focus: to use Cixous tongue-in-cheek, “women are body. More body, hence more writing.”62 What, in fact, the play between in/visible and femininity


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in the case of Susan Storm-Richards makes apparent is how, in its commercially- and culturally driven quest for beautiful visibility (of which Sue is a model, literally), the authentic image of each woman always suffers, and can be easily erased. What, one wonders, is worse, being prettily normal, that is, invisible, or being noticed as ugly? In the film the monstrous Thing votes first for the former option, but ends up triumphantly trading it for helpful—that is, visible—ugliness in the end. Finally, Sue does credit to her surname, Storm, by providing the unsettling natural force that—like the cosmic ray storm—upsets the road to a scientific utopia. For Braidotti, the “monstrous” female body has been the venue of inscription, “progressing from the fantastic dimension of the bodily organism to a more rationalistic construction of the body-machine,” and simultaneously of negation of patriarchal scientific thought.63 In the same way, in the FF Sue produces two children with chaotic potential: her son Franklin, a superpowerful mutant due to his inherited genetics, is set to become in the future either the Savior or the Destroyer of Worlds, verifying, on one hand, the myth of woman as Madonna/Eve, but, on the other, affirming female (pro)creativity over male techno-creation. Her daughter Valeria, in addition, owes her safe birth to Dr. Doom, who steps in when Reed is unable to help. Susan then lets Doom become the godfather and guardian of her daughter, leading by a regression to an organic and purely bodily path toward a reconciliation of magic and science, medievalism and futurism, evil and good that Mr. Fantastic’s technology, with all its attempts to render woman invisible and supplant her powers with machines, could not achieve.64

The Human Torch: No Man on Fire That leaves Susan’s younger brother Johnny Storm, a.k.a. the Human Torch, as the epitome of superheroic bodily parody. Granted by the cosmic rays the power to light up his whole body in living fire, project flames, and fly, the Torch takes his former hobby of hotrod car racing to turning his own body into that high-technology hotrod.65 The obvious representation of not only the torch of Liberty, an American symbol, but also an idealized Baby-Boomer generation—fast, shining, high-flying, ever-youthful, goodlooking—is overshadowed, however, by the inability of Johnny to ever slow down or evolve beyond his shallow sophomoric self. He represents the team spirit; but the spirit of America’s biotechnological future is ever-racing, and to reign it in by way of a maturation process that would make the Torch less hot but more Human mocks the potential for everlasting dynamism that is America. For, “in America,” Baudrillard observes, “the arrival of night-time or periods of rest cannot be accepted, nor can the Americans bear to see the technological process halted”—as seen symbolically in “the obsessive fear of the Americans . . . that the lights might go out.”66 In Jungian terms, the Torch represents the ego, the part of the personality that tends “to follow its own arbitrary impulses” but only so as “to make real the totality—the whole psyche. It is the ego that serves to light up the entire system, allowing it to

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become conscious and thus to be realized” (emphasis mine).67 It is indeed very often the Torch’s impetuous and reckless actions mobilize the team to a new adventure, or start some drama, but only as far as he follows Reed’s leadership to a happy conclusion. In the same way, the ego is said to be productive only when it is “able to listen attentively and to give itself, without any further design or purpose, to that inner urge toward growth,”68 a trait stressed in the film too, where Johnny is the first to embrace, name, and initiate the superhero team identity, but is only useful to it when he subdues his blatant egoistic immaturity. Since comics require constant action, however, those spells of human sobriety are soon burnt out, and it has been an increasing staple of the comic book to show the Torch “incapable of committing to a serious, long-term romantic relationship . . . Immature and prone to distraction in other areas . . . Impetuous and hotheaded.”69 Johnny Storm is further undermined by the fact that he is not the original Human Torch, but a re-creation of a 1940s “Golden Age” android superhero by the same name. This “passing on the torch” offers Johnny some legitimacy, but also sets an unsettling comparison between this technologically mutated human who loses his humanity and the older, more dignified robot that achieves humanity and heroism by painstaking effort. Johnny’s plight suggests then that mere bodily evolution without the comparable mental or spiritual ripening leaves, paradoxically, one a mere “spirit” indeed—like alcohol, very flammable, but with no underlying substance.

The Thing: Grotesque Rocks! Representing the body in the fourfold division of the self, Benjamin Grimm, a.k.a. “the Thing,” is finally the only member of the team with a nonhuman codename, not kin to the others, wearing merely a pair of briefs (or, later, tights) instead of a bodysuit, and so is in every way distanced from the other three. While the others represent the “giant step” forward, he is like a primeval stone idol drawn from the archetypal unconscious (though such idols carried an unusual amount of animation).70 According to von Franz, “the stone symbolizes what is perhaps the simplest and deepest experience— the experience of something eternal that man can have in those moments when he feels immortal and unalterable.”71 Since the cosmic rays turn his skin into a hideous orange rocklike growth, trapping him into a superstrong and invulnerable shell, the Thing in one sense resembles more Dr. Doom than the other team members, who can invoke their beautiful human bodies anytime. Yet, Ben comes across unquestionably (both in the comic book and the film) as the most human of the FF, perhaps, for one, because, as Jungians say, stones “are especially apt symbols of the Self because of the ‘just-so-ness’ of their nature”72 that eschews any alienating superimposition. For another reason, Ben’s role is the one comfortingly closest to the average man on the street, as opposed to a genius, a model/wife, or a pop idol. His name evokes the Franklinean ethic that is the legendary bedrock of the American marvel, since Ben chanced as Reed’s college roommate because of his football star


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scholarship, became a Second World War combat hero, and used his aviator talents to build his own successful enterprise. Thus, Ben serves as the Jungian animus, the inner masculine principle, both in its earliest manifestation as “a personification of mere physical power—for instance, as an athletic champion or ‘muscle man,’ ” and in its more mature subsequent role as a source of creative “spiritual firmness.”73 But Reed’s insistence that Ben pilot his experimental spaceship tragically confines Ben into being the mere strongman of the team, exaggerating his rough Hell’s Kitchen talk and attitude, summarized in the Thing’s battle cry: “It’s clobberin’ time!” A still deeper insight about techno-science is, therefore, intimated here, beyond the obvious Shelleyan point that careless use of biotechnology can afflict one’s dearest buddy with Frankensteinitis gravis. Techno-evolution, we are told, can actually regress the human body, since by transferring skill, dexterity, and importance to the biomechanical aids, the original flesh loses its usefulness, becomes a hulking, ungainly thing in contrast to its sleek and superfast accoutrements, and might as well be a Stone Age throwback—a grim fate indeed, as Ben’s surname suggests. In Eco’s terms, the Thing is the only hero who is really consumed by the accident; yet, ironically, by virtue of his afflicted body, Ben’s tragedy can also provide a reliable point of contrast and criticism to Mr. Fantastic’s project. In fact, Ben is the only one with his own philosophy and license to contradict, or make fun of, “Stretcho.” The Thing is also the only team member to develop constantly outside relationships, something that designates him as the comic connection to the real world: Ben Grimm represents the average male teenage comics reader, with his yet-rough thinking trying to adjust to a changing, uncomfortable body that sprouts hair and acne and a gravely voice, and with his attempt to mask the fear of change underneath an armor of culturally encrusted manhood and peer affections. In the avant-garde way of the FF, he may also be an early sign of the fitness craze that has been a basic trait of Western society since the 1980s, and which has led thousands of people, and especially insecure teens searching for strength and confidence, to “pump up” their bodies, often monstrously, in gyms and through drugs, often illegal and dangerous ones. To put it otherwise in Kristevan terms, the Thing is the symbolic shell of patriarchal masculinity that congeals over the semiotic potential underneath—and the irreversibility of the process, despite Reed’s frequent attempts to “cure” Ben, suggests the gradual conditioning of humans to fit their assigned bodies. This speaks for “Lacan’s description [in his 1953 ‘Some Reflections on the Ego’] of the formation of subjectivity in the mirror stage, in which a sense of ‘primordial Discord’ emerges alongside an image of corporeal totality, creating a fantasy of ‘the body in bits and pieces’ as a retrospective representation of presymbolic chaos,”74 as pictured eloquently in the fragmented, cobblestone quality of the Thing’s hide. It is also through Ben that the comic book tilts this Platonic supertechnological teleology toward the grotesque by going where Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein feared to tread, that is, in the realm of the sexuality of the monstrous body. As we learn from Anne K. Mellor’s study, what drives

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Dr. Frankenstein to destroy his female animant while still at the creation stage75 is fear of female sexuality as such. A woman who is sexually liberated, free to choose her own life, her own sexual partner (by force, if necessary). And to propagate at will can appear only monstrously ugly to Victor Frankenstein, for she defies that sexist aesthetic that insists that women be small, delicate, modest, passive, and sexually pleasing—but available only to their lawful husbands.76

Such a lady appears in 1989, when fellow superheroine Ms. Marvel is accidentally turned into a female Thing-clone with long eyelashes and breasts and becomes Ben’s lover. On one hand, “Ms. Thing” may be a simplistic male conceptualization of the new 1980s assertive woman, one of those Kirby women who, in Voger’s opinion, “are beautiful in their own way, but they’re powerful and not altogether sexual.”77 The romance promotes the comic-book soap opera without transgressing into the forbidden “contamination” of interspecies/interracial relationships (especially in a comic book without a single minority character in it), and it is never concluded, as the grotesque Ms. Marvel eventually reverts to pretty Sharon Ventura. Nevertheless, it is sobering to consider, even briefly, the proliferation of the truly mutated body, the nonhuman new human race, which might well be the projected foreboding on the outcome of current cultural and technological tampering with the body.78 In the other team members, the reversal into a human bodily form offers the comfort of the repeated and familiar sign whose recurrence in writing (here drawing), as Derrida suggests in Of Grammatology, is the basis for a system of meaning; but in a world of Things, what (signifying) value would the body have? Adjacent to this issue is the deconstruction of the ostensible glorification of team heroism, science, and family values in the FF by the focus on the unpredictable mutagenic potential of these same values. Alone, the body remains static; it is in its relation to other bodies that transformation occurs. Although technology can interfere with, or duplicate partly, the process of adaptive mutation, the network of stimuli is so much larger than a laboratory can hold, or predict. One is then led to wonder if it is the infamous “bioapparatus” that we truly have to fear,79 or whether we should instead focus on the transformations happening every day on a non-superheroic level due to simple interaction. As Elizabeth Grosz writes, “human bodies have the wonderful ability, while striving for integration and cohesion, organic and psychic wholeness, to also provide for and indeed produce fragmentations, fracturings, dislocations that orient bodies and body parts toward other bodies and body parts.”80 Hence, one should amend Eco’s observation that the superhero never changes, because s/he never interacts with “our” reality on anything but a limited “civic” level.81 The informational density of the panels on the comic-book page, increasingly less linear in its unfolding, where the body appears as both human and, in the same sweep of vision, mutated; the further blending of such action images with word-balloons that require momentary stasis; and the—often drastic—changes wrought on


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comic-book heroes by the changing of a penciller, or the recasting of their origin in a new series to reflect new mores or fashion trends; all these suggest the potentially transformative complexity not only of the “su(pe)r-real” but of the alluded-to real as well. At the same time, this “constellation of script and image in their material difference, being juxtaposed and integrated at the same time . . . parodies precisely that claim for a truth beyond the signs, and directs our attention to the constellation of signs itself,”82 but isn’t reality perception precisely such a sign system? Fantasy and reality interact further as the artists habitually put a bit of themselves into their characters: Kirby admits that many of his characters resemble him facially,83 while in the 2005 FF film Stan Lee upholds a private film tradition and makes a cameo appearance as the character Willie the Postman, who in the book brings to the team members fan mail from their comic book readers! Adding to that mimetic realism on the page (especially lately, with computer-assisted artwork), to superhero costumes at Halloween, to co-option of comic-book metaphors into the cliché stockhouse of language and culture, we see comic escapism constantly returning back to its human source.

Conclusion: A New Bodily Aesthetics? Still, if the cluster of panels on the page or the relationship of the team members in the FF is a bit like Foucault’s social web of “power/knowledge” relations,84 then it must be admitted that there is no way out of that text;85 that “the constellation of typographical and graphical signs . . . in their heterogeneous materiality . . . are already self-referential,”86 or, as Thomas Beebee puts it, the “noise,” “the non-systemic is simultaneously inside and outside the system.”87 The “stretching” of the techno-evolutionary vision into the American future is, therefore, either a chimera, or a metaphor for something else realizable within non-superhuman parameters. By deconstructing from the inside the tensions inherent in the classical ideal of the human form—which, if we remember its originating ideology, is itself based not on the “human measure” of some normalcy but in the effort to transcend the human and to become (running the risk of hubris all the while) isotheos (equal to the gods)—affirming the “play” of signification,88 the comic-book artist does not simply deliver a new and improved heroic body model, but also an escape from it. To the extent, in fact, that comic-book drawing is a kind of caricaturing or parody,89 a necessary abstraction in representation, this escape is already there—and justifiably so. The metaphysical aim of physical grotesqueness is inherent, according to Kroker, within the concept of high-technology or biotechnology utopianist visions: just like P. T. Barnum strained through the technological imperative: a perfect fusion of the traveling carnival show and high technology. With this difference . . . a perfect crystallization of technocracy’s loathing of nature and human nature . . . That’s the escape theme that pervades the promotional language . . . escaping from earth, escaping from the body, escaping from America.90

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The imperative for physical beauty, the cult of becoming the body, has recognizably become a hysteric concern for Western societies: “This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. It is the only object on which everyone is made to concentrate, not as a source of pleasure, but as an object of frantic concern.”91 Faced with the impossibility of ever matching screen idols or supermodels, the vulnerable teenager escapes into a fantasy world where this is realizable. On a deeper level, though, the obfuscation or distortion of the classical heroic form in some mainstream (and most alternative) comics, the stretching, pumping, twisting, mutating of the body is also an attempt to inscribe a new set of aesthetic codes for what is desirable, or “super,” one that liberates us (as seen from fan confessions in Pustz)92 from the tyranny of prescribed form. It is no coincidence that, with the passage of time and the exacerbation of youth existential anxieties, superheroes have been cast in ever scarier, grotesque, traumatized molds, as evident in the comparison of the bodies of the FF in the 1960s with that of the most popular X-Man since the 1980s, the Hobbesian—short, ugly, hairy, and brutish—Wolverine. The FF themselves have also long been replaced as the flagship of Marvel by the more daring X-Men, the true “homo superior” mutants divorced from humankind as a species and as “uncanny” bodies (a trait especially stressed in the teenage mutant characters among them). In other words, if anorexic airbrushed advertoids are recognizably one form of constructed fiction, setting standards more and more impossible to follow for the average person, why not construct and promote an antagonistic one that reflects the stress (stretch?) of perfecting the body? Even better, why not create a form that transcends the body problem, or at least agonizes over the inability to transcend—the “freak triumphant,” in Kroker’s words, “not . . . as a symbol of transgression, but of the impossibility of transgression”?93 The Romantic (classical, actually) equation “Beauty is truth,” and vice versa, is now replaced by Foucault’s more sober realization that truth (and ergo beauty) “is a thing of this world . . . produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power.” 94 If, therefore, the “regime of truth” is dependent on power, in a world of superpowered beings it is this might that sets the rules for what is desirable, exacting a small form of revenge, on behalf of comic book readers (stereotyped as dysfunctional freaks) against what reality aesthetics dictate. Perhaps we are returning to an age-old staple of heroic myth, as identified by Northrop Frye, which operates “near or at the conceivable limits of human desire,” but a desire, nevertheless, non-attainable by even the hero, who must suffer—often via metamorphosis—for attempting to transgress those limits.95 As Erich Auerbach noted, it is the scar that makes Odysseus recognizable by “foregrounding” his past into an “uninterrupted” flow of present (and, according to the heroic model, most heroes bear a signifying scar, from Siegfried to Harry Potter).96 Modern heroes push this idea to its breaking limits and become the scar, a psychological one this time: Batman is his childhood trauma, Superman is his loneliness as Krypton’s last son, Xena is her guilt, reflecting a society where a personal therapist is no longer a dark,


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shameful secret, but a posh accessory, easily brought into conversation as a mark of social status, personal distinction, or Woody-Allenesque wit and style. But the FF removes the scar from any purely temporal signification and imprint it on, and as, the whole body declaring its vulnerability, while at the same time it signals the body’s healing-transformative potential. It is thus that the grotesqueness of comic books such as the FF (also eulogized at about the same time in Allen Ginsberg’s groundbreaking 1956 Howl) can be perceived as ideal, but also as a foreboding of the projection of certain continuing trends in our Western culture. The beautiful grotesque that, by provoking and shocking, allows its bearer not to be invisible any more, to stretch above the crowd and achieve, even momentarily, a shining escape from conformity (a quality much devalued since the 1950s–1960s) is perhaps a way to understand the youth culture trends such as the “grunge” look, extreme tattooing and piercing, the “Bear” movement among gay men, and even, briefly in the early 1990s, cosmetic scarification. After all, the pluri- and multi-ideologies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have made ample room for the easy coexistence of different physiques, despite the pressures of the entertainment industry. At the same time, in an era where the human body, compared to the machine, is losing in importance and superiority and is questioned as the grounding signifier for “humanity,” deconstructing the body by bringing to surface its inherent, or latent, potential for deformity—poking at the scar so to speak—is a kind of cultural preemptive strike against the fear of such future mutations (a fear that has been growing in our culture since the effects of the atom bomb on human genes first became known): not only an acceptance of the body’s imperfect status, but also a game of “chicken” with evolution. It is a mentality akin to that which Henri Bergson observes about the caricaturist: He makes his models grimace as they would by themselves if they could take their grimace all the way. He guesses, under the surface harmonies of form, the deep insurrections of matter. He realizes the imbalances and distortions . . . that didn’t manage to reach their completion, since they were exorcised by a higher power. His art, that partakes somewhat of the diabolical, raises again the demon that the angel had thrown down.97

This gambit of negative aesthetics became painfully obvious in the failure of the first FF film in 1994, which, in returning the comic bodies to an “angelic” realism sans medium conventions, made their superhero oddity look abysmally inane.98 Only the Thing looked real because he has never looked real. The grotesque annulment of classical-beauty standards may derive from an overextension of those same ideal standards that is particularly fit for the comic-book medium, but it ends up one step beyond. What it aims at is a condition where, because its grotesqueness liberates form from any secondary significations other than physical utility, body as flesh is dissolved into the ideal concept of mere (or, rather, utter) capacity (and thus, if we extend Beebee’s theory, its new “use-value” becomes the foundation

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of a new genre—or species, perhaps?),99 and matter does no longer matter. In the grafting of the unreal onto reality (Baudrillard’s “hyperreality” of American utopianism);100 in an individuative process that can never be completed because we can never transcend, even in our most fantastic ventures, the mark of our physicality and our particular era (be it the 1960s or the 2000-somethings); finally, in what it promises to give but always must withhold from the reader 101 (a body so unfit, that it fits) does the comic book establish its never-ending, and utterly fantastic, charm.

Notes 1. As seen in, among other analyses, Ruth Vasey’s study on public and media images in America. 2. Zachopoulos 13–14. 3. See, for example, Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings or The Nam series by veteran Doug Murray, published by Marvel in 1986. 4. As seen in the inspired combination of Plato and Nietzsche in writer Alan Moore’s and artist Dave Gibbons’s 1986–1987 acclaimed DC mini-series The Watchmen. 5. Lord Raglan’s monomyth and Mircea Eliade’s myth of the eternal return, not to mention Joseph Campbell’s schema of the heroic cycle, easily apply to such heroes as Marvel’s 1941 Captain America by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, or DC’s 1938 Superman by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. 6. As in Marvel’s 1963 The X-Men by Chris Claremont, noted for its ongoing allegory on subjects such as racism (the 80s “Genosha” storyline), anti-Semitism (the first X-Men film), or homophobia (the “Cassandra Nova” 2002 storyline and the second X-Men film). 7. On the negative view of comics, see Nyberg. 8. Quoted in Sabin 98. 9. Mitchell 15. On the subject of comics as reflections of culture, see Witek and Inge. 10. Kaindl 183. 11. Ibid. 183. 12. Pustz 13. 13. Examples of the latter are, among others, Astérix (a René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo hit since 1959–1961), Raw’s 1972 Maus by Art Spiegelman and DC’s 1989 The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. 14. See Freud’s “Creative Writers and Daydreaming.” 15. Voger 36. 16. Murray 14. 17. Voger 36. 18. Lee and Kirby, 1961. 19. Brady 68. 20. Ibid. 68. 21. Ibid. 68. 22. A methodologically similar, yet admittedly much more negative, critique of fantasy-as-allegory of the pathology of culture can be seen in Marin’s 1977 “Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia.” 23. Holman and Harmon 219.

Fa n t a s t ic 4-b ody-i ng s 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

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Braidotti 7–8. Baudrillard 95. Kroker 38. Eco 867–868. Ibid. 868–869. Kaindl 173–174. von Franz 214. Eco 868. Baudrillard 76. von Franz 161–162. Fender 7–8. Preoccupation with the space-race program, as seen poignantly in Oriana Fallaci’s journalistic memoir-novel of postwar America, If the Sun Dies (New York: Kingsport, 1966), had reached the point of national craze among all age groups, and led then to scientific speculations that appeared much more fantastic than even comic-book scenarios. Brady 68. Lacan 384. von Franz 211. An issue most thoroughly and controversially explored in Marvel’s 1962 The Incredible Hulk, again by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby—whose two film adaptations have joined 2008’s Iron Man, the three X-Men, and three Spiderman films (so far) as a Marvel screen blockbuster. In the film, in fact, the hubris is lessened by having the space station (this time) belong to Reed’s antagonistic former classmate who now funds Reed’s ambitious project, Victor von Doom (see more below). While Reed only wants to study the cosmic ray storm for medical purposes beneficial to humankind, von Doom’s faulty equipment and his insistence that the experiment go on, despite the danger, are what bring about the transformation. The change, though serving well the “Good Scientist, Bad Tycoon” motif, blunts the intricacy and sharpness of the questions posed by the original comic, on whose thinking this essay is based. The character, a caricature of Henry Kissinger that became a cultural metaphor, comes from the 1964 offbeat hit film by Stanley Kubrick (who also wrote the screenplay with Terry Southern), starring Peter Sellers, Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. In what has become by now an anecdotal piece of Americana, Oppenheimer, seeing his plutonium bomb explode at Los Alamos on July 16, 1945, finally realized the ramifications of his team’s creation and whispered the line from the Hindu epic, the Baghavad Gita: “Behold, I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds.” See Carnes. Brady 87. Echoing Alexander Dumas’s 1846 The Man in the Iron Mask—and admittedly foreshadowing Darth Vader, according to Donald Markstein. In the film, Doom’s similarity to Reed and the rest of the group is in fact heightened by having him also to be exposed to the cosmic rays and mutate into an organic metal-being with electromagnetic powers. The difference there is that while Reed views the mutation as “an infection,” Doom enjoys it as a step toward godhood—reflecting the typical division between humanitarian (usually medicine-related) aspects of science and industrial technology that corrupts one’s humanity out of them and turns them into “robots.”

150 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

C h r i s t i n a D okou Groensteen 40–41. Kroker 7–8. Braidotti 63. Cixous 342. Brady 73. Television’s W.A.S.P. situational comedy idols of the 1950s and the 1960s, looking practically identical in their short platinum-blonde coiffs, blue eyes, matching pastel outfits, and perennially sunny, angel-in-the-house disposition, these actresses/typecast TV characters (the former the star of several films and shows, and the latter the “mother” in the series Leave It to Beaver) created a slew of female imitators on- and offscreen, cementing the legend of the impeccable American suburban housewife. Brady 73. Bowing to the changed mores of the twenty-first century, this trait is turned to Sue’s advantage in the film, where Reed admits that his ignoring of Sue’s (and his own) needs and amorous feelings was what led to their earlier college breakup and subsequent estrangement. As literally depicted in Lee and Kirby 1974, 59. Jung 17. von Franz 195. Brady 73. Lee and Kirby 1974, 15. Hillman and Mazzio xvi; also Cixous 342. On the discussion of woman as monster, see Braidotti 79–83; and Kristevan film theorist Barbara Creed’s book The Monstrous Feminine. Mulvey 425. For the gendered division of image and word, as well as the impact of technology on those concepts, see Hocks and Kendrick. Cixous 343. Braidotti 83. Brady 88. Brady 71. Baudrillard 50. von Franz 163. von Franz 164. Brady 71. Jaffé 259. von Franz 224. As Baudrillard also says about America, “It is metamorphic forms that are magical. Not the sylvan, petrified, mineralized forest . . . It takes this surreality of the elements to eliminate nature’s picturesque qualities, just as it takes the metaphysics of speed to eliminate the natural picturesqueness of travel” (8–9). Therefore, the presence of a stone man draws attention both in primal and futuristic terms. von Franz 221. von Franz 206–207. Hillman and Mazzio xvi. Shelley 150–151. Mellor 224. Voger 38. On the subject of the new conceptualization of the body in techno-culture, see Dyens. Kroker 162.

Fa n t a s t ic 4-b ody-i ng s 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

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Grosz 13. Eco 876. Frahm 180. Voger 36. As seen in all of Michel Foucault’s work, but especially in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison (1975) and Power/Knowledge (1980). As is also shown by the whole Derridean endeavor, seminally in his 1967 De la grammatologie, where there is nothing that is beyond the text and all one can observe is the “traces” in the text of anomalies, philosophical tensions and the “plurivocity” of writing. Frahm 180. Beebee 17. Derrida 1978, 292. Frahm 179. Kroker 17. Baudrillard 35. Pustz 83. Kroker 127. Foucault 2001, 1668. Frye 1810. Auerbach 654–667. Bergson 27–29 [the quote translation is mine]. The Fantastic Four 1994. Beebee 250. Baudrillard 28. The infamous “dissimulation of the woven texture” (of the text, which “is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible” [Derrida 2000, 63]).

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Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. 1972. Dissemination. Translated and introduced by Barbara Johnson. London: The Athlone Press, 2000. ———. 1967. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ———. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In Writing and Difference. Translated with an Introduction and Additional Notes by Alan Bass, 278–293. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. Dyens, Ollivier. Metal and Flesh; The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over. Translated by Evan J. Bibbee and Ollivier Dyens. Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 2001. Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” In The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, edited by David H. Richter, 866–877. Second edition. Boston: Bedford, 1998. Fallaci, Oriana. If the Sun Dies. New York: Kingsport, 1966. Fender, Stephen. “The American Difference.” In Modern American Culture: An Introduction, edited by Mick Gidley, 1–22. New York: Longman, 1994. Foucault, Michel. 1975. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. ———. “From Truth and Power.” Translated by Colin Gordon. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 1667–1670. New York and London: Norton, 2001. ———. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Random House USA Inc, 1980. Frahm, Ole. “Weird Signs. Comics as Means of Parody.” In Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics, edited by Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen, 177–190. Translated by Michael Hein. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press/University of Copenhagen, 2000. Freud, Sigmund. 1908. “Creative Writers and Daydreaming.” In Critical Theory Since Plato. Revised ed., edited by Hazard Adams, 712–716. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1992. Frye, Northrop. “Anatomy of Criticism: Mythic Archetypes.” In Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, sixth edition, edited by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, 1810–1811. New York: Harper Collins College Publishers, 1995. Groensteen, Thierry. “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” In Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics, edited by Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen, 29–41. Translated by Shirley Smolderen. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press/University of Copenhagen, 2000. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Hillman, David and Carla Mazzio. The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Hocks, Mary E. and Michelle R. Kendrick, eds. Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media. Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 2003. Holman, Hugh C. and William Harmon. A Handbook to Literature. 6th edition New York: Macmillan, 1992. Inge, Thomas M. Comics as Culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1980.


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Jaffé, Aniela. “Symbolism in the Visual Arts.” In Man and His Symbols, edited and introduced by Carl G. Jung, 255–322. New York: Dell/Laurel, 1968. Jung, Carl Gustav. “Approaching the Unconscious.” In Man and His Symbols, edited and introduced by Carl G. Jung, 1–94. New York: Dell/Laurel, 1968. Kaindl, Klaus. “Multimodality in the Translation of Humour in Comics.” In Perspectives on Multimodality, edited by Eija Ventola, Charles Cassidy, and Martin Kaltenbacher, 173–192. Document Design Companion 6. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004. Kroker, Arthur. SPASM: Virtual Reality, Android Music and Electric Flesh. Culture Texts Series. Montréal: New World Perspectives, 1993. Lacan, Jacques. 1949. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism, third edition, edited by Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, 382–399. New York and London: Longman, 1994. Lee, Stan (writer) and Jack Kirby (penciller). “Captives of the Deadly Duo.” The Fabulous Fantastic Four: Marvel Treasury Edition 1. 2 (1974): 4–27. ———. “The Coming of Galactus!” The Fabulous Fantastic Four: Marvel Treasury Edition 1. 2 (1974): 52–98. ———. The Fantastic Four. New York: Marvel Comics/Marvel Entertainment Group, 1961. Marin, Louis. 1977. “Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism, third edition, edited by Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, 283–295. New York and London: Longman, 1994. Markstein, Donald D. “The Fantastic Four.” Toonopedia, http://www.toonopedia.com/ fant4.htm (accessed November 25, 2008). Mellor, Anne K. “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein.” In Romanticism and Feminism, edited by Anne K. Mellor, 220–232. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Representation.” In Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 11–22. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism, third edition, edited by Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, 422–431. New York and London: Longman, 1994. Murray, Will. “Farewell to the King: Friends Remember That King of Comics, the Legendary Jack Kirby.” Comics Scene 42 (May 1994): 12–15, 56. Nyberg, Amy K. “Poisoning Children’s Culture: Comics and Their Critics.” In Scorned Literature: Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America, edited by Madeleine B. Stern, Lydia C. Schurman, and Deidre Johnson, 167–186. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002. Pustz, Matthew. Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers. Jackson, NC: University of Mississippi Press, 1999. Sabin, Roger. Adult Comics: An Introduction. New Accents series. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Shelley, Mary. 1818. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus. Introduction by Diane Johnson. New York and Toronto: Bantam, 1981. Vasey, Ruth. “The Media.” In Modern American Culture: An Introduction, edited by Mick Gidley, 213–238. New York: Longman, 1994.

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Voger, Mark. “Living Legend: A Half-century Later, Jack Kirby Is Still the American Comic Book.” Comics Scene Yearbook 2 (1993): 35–39. von Franz, Marie L. “The Process of Individuation.” In Man and His Symbols, edited and with an Introduction by Carl G. Jung, 161–254. New York: Dell/Laurel, 1968. Witek, Joseph. “From Genre to Medium: Comics and Contemporary American Culture.” In Rejuvenating the Humanities, edited by Ray B. Brown and Marshall Fishwick, 71–79. Bowling Green: Popular, 1992. Zachopoulos, Christos. “Introduction.” In Greek Political Cartoons, edited by Christos Zachopoulos, prologue by Ioannis Varvitsiotis. Lefkomata series, 9–36. Athens: The Constantinos Karamanlis Institute for Democracy—Sideris Publications, 2002.

Filmography The Fantastic Four. Dir. Tim Story. Marvel Entertainment Group, 2005. The Fantastic Four. Dir. Oley Sassone. Marvel Entertainment, 1994. The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, starring Chris Evans, Jessica Alba, Ioan Gruffudd, Michael Chiklis, Julian McMahon, Lawrence Fishburne (Marvel Entertainment Group, 2007).

9

E m e rge nc e: Ne w Fl esh a n d L i f e i n Ne w M e di a A rt Edwina Bartlem

Digital information and biotechnologies have transformed concepts of

life, bodies, and humanity within Western cultures and these shifts have bought with them an increasing sense of excitement and ambivalence about where these new technologies may lead. In this new digital and biotech era, emergence and cyborg hybridity have become important metaphors for conceptualizing life and flesh in a state of mutation and reconfiguration as a result of human experimentations with biotechnologies. Not surprisingly, these concerns with fleshy-mutation, emergence, cyborg hybridity, and the related idea of the posthuman, are also present in contemporary new media art, especially digital and biological art (bio-art). Information and biotechnologies provide alternative modes for observing and representing the body and life on macro and microscopic levels, while simultaneously offering their own aesthetic possibilities and limitations to artists. This essay surveys the work of particular new media artists that use information or biotechnologies to engage with the discourses and practices of technologically mediated evolution. It is the main focus of this essay to explore how the themes of emergence, cyborg hybridity, and posthuman aesthetics are manifested in contemporary digital Artificial-life (A-life) art and biological-art (bio-art) projects. I am particularly interested in how representations and manifestations of new life, new flesh and new bodies in art are impacting on definitions of fleshy-life, and, equally, the aesthetic, ethical and political premises of art. I maintain that new media art has emerged as a dynamic site of inquiry and experimentation into the ethics and aesthetics of information and biotechnologies and new imaginings of the body, flesh and life. Themes of fleshy-mutation, emergence, and cyborg hybridity are addressed in contemporary new media art in a range of ways. There are at least four artistic trends for dealing with these themes in art. These approaches can be broadly described as representational, cyborg performance, artificial-life experiments, and biological art practice. I am primarily concerned with the

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third and fourth tendencies in art but will briefly outline the other two approaches below to indicate their differences from A-life art and bio-art practice. The representational mode is the most conventional approach and entails artists creating representations of what they imagine future flesh, bodies, and environments to look like with the aid of digital technologies. These works are often futuristic, horrific, and sensationalist in nature, drawing on the evocative power of science fiction and Gothic horror narratives about the threat of mad scientists and the decline of humanity through technological dependence and flesh-machine hybridity. I am thinking here of artists such as the Australian-based practitioner Patricia Piccinini, who, since the mid-1990s, has created artworks across a range of media that present imaginary versions of posthuman bodies and mutant creatures that could evolve out of genetic experimentations and reproductive technologies.1 Piccinini’s computer-generated photographs from the Protein Lattice series (1997), for example, explore human interrelationships with engineered animals and the human obsession with youth and beauty. Since the early 2000s, her sculptural installations, such as Still Life with Stem Cells (2002), The Young Family (2003), and Leather Landscape (2003), have presented viewers with renditions of chimerical life-forms that blurred the imagined boundaries between the human and animal (figure 9.1). These evocative works stimulate debate about where new information and biotechnologies may lead, but at the end of the day they still occupy a relatively safe position as representational art that depicts imaginary, and often grotesque, hybrid creatures that emerge from scientific experiments. The process of developing and making these works does not engage directly with the research, technologies, or techniques of new biological sciences. The second trend for dealing with fleshy-mutation, emergence, and cyborg hybridity in art can be described as cyborg performance art. A few pioneering artists, such as Stelarc and Orlan, go beyond postulating on the appearance of new bodies, life-forms, and environments by fusing their own flesh with machinery and transforming it through surgical techniques to perform a version of cyborg subjectivity (figure 9.2).2 These artists manifest what could be called a cyborg posthuman aesthetic—an aesthetic that is beyond the biologically human and that emphasizes human interrelationships with new technologies and engineered life. They manifest this aesthetic through their bodily engagements with mechanical, digital, and biotechnologies that effectively transform their natural biological body into a cyborg form. The third and fourth trends entail artists using new information and biotechnologies to create lifelike creatures or systems. In some cases they create living and “semi-living” creatures as part of their creative practice.3 Australian artist Jon McCormack, for example, creates A-life systems, creatures, and environments as artworks that are often presented as installations in public galleries. Digital A-life is a synthetic and digital medium where computer programmers seek to recreate biological systems and behaviors as digital systems or entities.4 Other artists create what I call biological Artificial

Figure 9.1 Patricia Piccinini The Young Family (2002) Silicone, polyurethane, leather, plywood, human hair 80cm x 150cm x 110cm. Source: Photograph by Graham Baring

Figure 9.2 Stelarc EXOSKELETON Cankarjev Dom, Warehouse, Vhrinka, Slovenia (2003). Source: Photograph by Igor Skafar. Robot Construction-F18 Hamburg Funded by Kampnagel, Hamburg

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life (or bio A-life) by creating new fleshy-life forms out of biological scientific techniques and technologies. Bio-artists employ biological scientific knowledge, methodologies, and technologies as part of their artistic practice and often create new life-forms and life-systems for aesthetic and ideological purposes. By using biotechnologies and methodologies such as tissue engineering, stem cell research, xenotransplantation, and genomics as part of their creative practice, bio-artists raise serious philosophical and ethical questions regarding the perceived legitimate and illegitimate uses of these technologies and practices.5 This essay is primarily concerned with digital and bio A-life art as sites of critical inquiry and experimentation into posthuman ethics and aesthetics, which is why I have decided to focus on analyzing the aesthetics, content, and processes of a digital artwork and several biological artworks. The digital A-life section focuses on a work by Jon McCormack, Turbulence: an interactive museum of unnatural history (1995). Chicago-based artist Eduardo Kac, Australian-based collaborators the Tissue Culture and Art Project (Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts), and Stelarc provide the main case studies for the bio-art section. An interdisciplinary approach is adopted to the themes of emergence, cyborg hybridity, and posthuman aesthetics in digital and bio A-life art because these fields are by nature sites of intersection and exchange between different areas of research from biology, cybernetics, and robotics to aesthetics and philosophy. Writing from diverse academic and creative fields, including histories of artificial life, art, spectatorship, and the biological sciences, will be drawn upon to construct my argument about the transformative potentials of A-life artwork.6 Artists’ personal accounts will also be drawn upon regarding their philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic approaches to creating bio-art. This is not to assume that the artists’ intention is the only way of reading these works; it is rather to acknowledge that artists’ accounts are intertwined with how viewers interpret and experience artworks, including digital and bio-art forms. This is especially the case for artists who are also prolific writers and lecturers relating to their own work and specialized fields.7 The discourse surrounding their work becomes an integral part of the work itself. Art and new media historians and theorists such as T. J. Clark, Oliver Grau, and Roy Ascott offer valuable theories and critiques of models of viewer experience and interaction with technology-based art. Art historian T. J. Clark argues that a work of art can be treated as a discourse because it is a site of exchange, contention, and dialogue.8 Clark draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue, which asserts that discourses and languages (written, spoken, visual and audiovisual) are “open to dispute” and infused with meaning.9 Artists, curators, and viewers negotiate the aesthetics, content, and ethics of a work of art within a particular sociohistorical context. Considering that bio-art works are often created in laboratories and exhibited in public galleries as installations, these environments are inextricably linked with how the artwork is experienced and interpreted.

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Formal, technical, and thematic elements of particular digital and bio-art works will be explored to contemplate how these elements operate together in an exhibition context to immerse the participant-viewer in a conceptual dialogue with the work, especially regarding the philosophical and ethical issues of emergence, engineered life, cyborg hybridity, digital, and bio-art. I maintain that digital and bio A-life are sites of dialogue, debate, and intellectual exchange about the meanings of life—artificial, organic, and hybrid— and the meanings of art. New digital and biotech life-forms, whether they are created in a computer system or the laboratory for scientific purposes or as art objects (and I use this term cautiously), raise a number of questions regarding definitions of life. What does it mean to be human and what does it mean to create new life-forms? What defines life? Who defines life? What are our responsibilities to our new biologically engineered offspring? Is it ethical to use biotechnologies to engineer living or semi-living entities as art objects? The questions seem limitless and I acknowledge that I will not be able to address all of these problems sufficiently in such a short essay, but what I can do is to begin to map this terrain.

Emergence and Digital A-life Emergence is a key theoretical concept in the context of this analysis. The word itself implies change, transformation, alteration, mutation, permutation, innovation, and movement. It also hints at the presence of something latent, something ambiguous that is hidden just below the surface and that will potentially rise up out of an uncharted territory. Contained within this term is the word merge, which suggests processes of combination, synthesis, fusion, and amalgamation. Both emergence and merge imply postmodern concepts of fluidity, multiplicity, and hybridity. It is for these reasons that emergence is appropriated here as a metaphor for dealing with new concepts and representations of flesh and life in a neo-biological era where the physical and psychological boundaries between humans and machines, or humans and other species (especially other animals), are breaking down. In addition to being a metaphor for the appearance and engineering of new forms of life and bodies in new media art, emergence is also mobilized to explain the more active modes of audience engagement that are encouraged by these interactive and sometimes confrontational artworks. The postmodern and biological artistic experiments under discussion here invite viewers to play with the work and to have an active role in creating, discovering, and mutating new life-forms. They entice viewers to confront the social and ethical issues circulating around new modes of information and biotechnologies and act as catalysts that stimulate viewers to think about issues such as how new technologies are transforming humanist notions of the body and humanity, or what our responsibilities to scientific and artistically engineered creatures might be. As a discourse in new media theory and practice, emergence is central to the field of digital A-life research, where computer programmers seek to

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design computer systems that generate “emergent or evolutionary processes” and behaviors.10 In Metacreation, Michael Whitelaw claims that for A-life designers, emergence “explains the crucial leap it makes between nonlife and life.”11 A-life designers attempt to recreate biological systems as digital systems that replicate the so-called natural behaviors of living things, such as birth, growth, replication, autonomy, adaptation, learning, and death.12 Emergence in digital A-life has connotations of the Darwinian concepts of evolution and natural selection, where organisms survive because of their ability to adapt to change in specific environments. Simultaneously though, A-life designers endeavor to generate new digital life-forms and digital systems to reconceptualize life. Christopher Langton argues that computer-generated artificial-life research has a dual function: creating “life-as-we-know-it” and “life-as-itcould-be.”13 Thus, it extends the domain of the biological as it exists toward a zoology of futuristic and imaginary life. A-life as defined by Langton and other A-lifers, such as Thomas Ray, is marked by a decisive break from conceptualizing life and (re)production as natural. Instead, the focus is on narratives of innovation, replication, and rapid artificial evolution.14 This suggests an open-endedness of life and time, redefining life as a continual process that is subject to engineering, chance encounters, and transformation. Digital A-lifers are often interested in the random and unpredictable behaviors that evolve out of computational rules and processes. Whitelaw has claimed that More broadly, emergence refers to something novel or unanticipated, something extra; what makes a-life systems striking is the fact that, made as they are from commonplace components, they yet manifest complex, subtle, unpredictable behaviour.15

Digital A-life research contains prophecies of futuristic, posthuman and postorganic life. A-life is understood as a system of complex behaviors, rather than being a structure related to matter, flesh, or bodies.16 In fact, A-life theory assertively proposes that life can exist without a biological body even if it still requires a technological system to circulate within. Digital A-life is not just posthuman; it is post-organic. As a concept and cultural metaphor, emergent A-life evokes associations with posthuman and engineered life as we experience it now through the hybridization of organic bodies with nonorganic or unnatural elements and processes. Emergent A-life can be seen as part of a movement away from essentialist and naturalized ways of conceiving the body, toward a manifestation of Haraway’s metaphor of cyborg subjects.17 It links to postmodern and poststructuralist ideas of bodies and identities as being in a state of emergence and technological extension. Perhaps more importantly, emergence and digital A-life hint at the impact that information technology paradigms have had on the reconceptualization of life, bodies, and notions of identity. In his book Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization, Kevin Kelly argues that the line between “the born and the made” has become


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irredeemably blurred.18 Artificial intelligence research suggests that life and dynamic living systems can be synthesized within digital systems. Selfreplicating computer programs mimic organic life and processes of evolution. Simultaneously, the biological sciences, especially genetic engineering, have begun to insert technical processes into organisms. As Kelly proposes, “at the same time that the logic of Bios is being imported into machines, the logic of Technos is being imported into life.”19 The result is a culturally perceived meld between the organic and the technological, with mechanical and synthetic objects or systems becoming more lifelike, and organic systems (such as human bodies, plants, and viruses) becoming more constructed and engineered. Ultimately, life is becoming more artificial and more hybridized. The realm of the born—all that is natural—and the realm of the made—all that is humanly constructed—are becoming one. Machines are becoming biological and the biological is becoming engineered.20

The digital A-life paradigm shares with biology a tendency to reduce life to a simple genetic code and the inclination to interpret life as a form of information processing. Once life is symbolically reduced to code, this raw data can then be recoded or recombined into alternative patterns and systems—alternative life-forms and ecologies. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Kathryn Hales comments that “the posthuman view privileges the informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life.”21 Digital A-life discourses reinforce the idea that the center of human identity is located in the mind.22 The mind is understood as the central site of human identity, a system that holds information (memories and knowledge), not dissimilar to a computer hard drive. Embodiment is often removed from the A-life equation, with bodies being seen as refinable and replaceable mechanisms. This implies that bodies and their social significance (their status in terms of gender, ethnicity, shape, size, and sexuality) are not relevant to how we perceive life and develop identity, a position that is deeply problematic. Simon Penny and Hayles have observed that the philosophic traditions that inform computer and cybernetic science affirm the Cartesian duality of the mind/body split. Theoretically, the information of the mind can be transferred into another body or cybernetic system. The body is understood as a mechanism or “the original prosthesis” in this model.23 Cybernetic research of this nature indicates a fascination with transcending and transforming the biological body. This paradigm is imbued with utopic ideals and transcendental longings for an escape from the physical body to a dematerialized world of data or “pure information,” as Michael Benedikt calls it.24 Penny has been particularly critical of cybernetic and A-life tendencies of conceptually separating thinking from embodiment. According to Penny, we should be reworking understandings of the body to see it as a whole

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system, and should be reconceptualizing thinking as an activity that takes place throughout the body.25 Penny calls for artists to return to embodied modes of art practice and to evoke active, bodily modes of audience participation.26 Arguably, many digital- and bio-artists have responded to this call and are creating objects, installations, and events that encourage embodied modes of interaction and participation. These embodied modes of engagement create a sensory space from which to negotiate the content of the work physically and conceptually.

Digital A-life Art Whitelaw has observed that while artists may have “followed a-life science” in constructing artificial environments, they are often less concerned with “replicating the dynamics of biological systems” and are more concerned with creating environments for “human experience and interaction.”27 Artists frequently create A-life forms and artificial ecologies that effectively provide viewers with constructed environments that encourage interactive and immersive experiences.28 As such, emergence in digital A-life artworks often takes place on at least two levels: the evolutionary processes of the computer program that takes place on screen and the interactive relationship between the viewer and the artwork. Australian artist Jon McCormack explores themes and processes of A-life, unnatural selection and artificial evolution as screen-based installations that physically, visually, and conceptually immerse the viewer. McCormack has been working with video and computer-generated interactive and responsive screen-based installations since the late 1980s. One of McCormack’s most famous emergent works, Turbulence: an interactive museum of unnatural history, extends Langton’s theory of A-life by generating digital A-life forms that have an uncanny appearance of realness or liveliness about them. The digital interface of Turbulence symbolically links digital A-life forms to biological and medical histories of collection, classification, and experimentation. In 2004, Turbulence was exhibited at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne as part of a retrospective of McCormack’s digital artwork. The installation consisted of an interactive projection of emergent, digitally generated A-life forms and a soundtrack amplified in multiple directions. Turbulence offered viewers the opportunity to enter and amble around an architecturally and visually immersive installation. To experience this museum of unnatural history, visitors needed to enter the installation via a narrow corridor and entrance—a threshold to a turbulent and uncanny zone. The only light emanated from the touch screen and screen projection, directing the viewers’ attention to the images on screen. The digital component of the work featured apparently organic A-life forms in a state of evolution and transformation. McCormack’s work reflects an ambivalent attitude toward the possible outcomes of artificial life and artificial natures through their aesthetics.29 These virtual creatures and worlds do not appear to be completely harmless or benign. In fact, they are often in a state of rapid


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evolution, displaying frightening and aggressive behavior toward each other and the viewer. Participants were able to use a touch screen to interact with the work, selecting A-life creatures that were grouped according to biota (or type) and then projected onto a large screen in a process of emergence. New media theorist Darren Tofts has said of Turbulence that The modest user interface of Turbulence heightened the sensation of being in an unencumbered experience, and its impact was such that you didn’t necessarily have to be in command of it to feel a part of the “place” that was created within the installation.30

Tofts’ assertion that viewers are given a sense of being a part of the artificial environment while occupying this temporary installation implies that viewers are given the sensation of being embedded in, and immersed within, the virtual world of the work. The immersive experience is created for viewers through a combination of elements: the small entrance; the architectural space of the installation; the darkness of the space; and the projection of ephemeral digital A-life. Interactivity and physical immersion work together to increase the sense of psychological immersion and connection that viewers have with the A-life environments and creatures presented on screen. The immediate affects of the work are surprise, repulsion, and fear, followed by contemplation of the possible consequences of engineering digital and biological life-forms. This immersive aesthetic encourages participants to contemplate what their relationships might be to the newly engineered offspring of biological and information technologies.

Biological A-life Art In contrast to digital A-life artists, bio-artists deal with the materiality of tissue, cells, and flesh in the creation of their new organisms. Ambivalences about bio-art emerge out of cultural anxieties around biotechnologies. Anxieties about the loss of the biologically human; the engineering of artificial life-forms; the reemergence of old forms of eugenics; the suffering of animals in the name of scientific research and art; and human inabilities to deal with death are only a few of the ethical issues revolving around bio-art. When artists utilize animals or techno-scientific knowledges, practices, and procedures as part of their artistic practice, questions about the appropriateness of such use seem to emerge. Ethical questions are raised about the legitimate use of biotechnologies and procedures as part of an aesthetic practice: Is it ethical for artists to use biotechnologies and techniques as part of their creative practice? Is this a valid form of social and ethical creative critique? Bio A-life art draws attention to the ongoing human project of manipulating life and creating new, hybrid living organisms for aesthetic and scientific purposes. Bio-art is not a new phenomenon; rather, it has a history that is more associated with folk culture than with high art. American artist George

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Gessert refers to the aesthetic project of propagating and crossbreeding flowers, plants, and animals as a form of “genetic folk art.”31 Gessert positions his own art practice, which involves creating hybrid varieties of wildflowers and plants and then exhibiting them within an art gallery context, as part of a folk art tradition. Enacting a process of unnatural selection and artificial reproduction, Gessert decides which flowers are most aesthetically pleasing to continue propagating and crossbreeding into new hybrids. His work alludes to human histories and processes of evaluating, interpreting, and manipulating nature.32 Gessert’s art questions definitions of art, while it also highlights the human history of engineering new and hybrid life-forms as a creative practice. Although Gessert utilizes techniques of selective breeding and genetic engineering of plants in the production of his art, his practice does not seem to generate as much controversy or anxiety as art that involves animal experimentations and genetic engineering or other biotech procedures. This is probably because humans create hierarchies of living things—usually positioning themselves at the top of the evolutionary pyramid. Experimenting with humans is more contentious and anxiety-riddled as a result of this symbolic structure.33 Furthermore, an imaginary division between sentient and non-sentient life-forms comes into play when we contemplate invasive experimentations with living things. In 1998, Eduardo Kac, a Brazilian-born artist who is now based in Chicago, generated impassioned debate about the use of genetic engineering and animal experimentation as a creative process and medium. Kac argued for a new medium that he called “transgenic art,” the transferral of genes from one organism to another to create (or engineer) a hybrid creature. Kac described transgenic art as a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering techniques to transfer synthetic genes to an organism, or to transfer natural genetic material from one species into another, to create a unique living being. Molecular genetics allows the artist to engineer the plant and animal genome and create new lifeforms.34

In 2000, Kac commissioned a French Research Institute, INR A (Institute National de la Recherche Agronomique), to engineer Alba, a rabbit that glows fluorescent-green when illuminated by blue light. The scientists engineered the transgenic rabbit by injecting the green fluorescent protein (GFP) of a pacific jellyfish into the egg of an albino rabbit. Alba was to be part of an installation and performance by Kac entitled, GFP BUNNY (2000). The engineered rabbit produced heated debate among scientists, artists, animal activists, and art critics about the use of biotechnologies in the production of art. Art critics, animal activists, and scientists questioned whether it was appropriate for artists to use these techniques in order to reflect upon the bioethics of medical science. Is it art? Is it exploitation? Should we be thinking of animals as research objects or art objects? What responsibilities do


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artists have for the living or “semi-living” creatures that they create in the name of art? Just as Marcel Duchamp’s introduction of ready-mades into the context of the gallery pushed the limits of what was considered to be art, so too did Kac’s proposal of introducing a genetically designed animal as a design object challenge the limits of what was considered to be art.35 One of the most interesting aspects of Kac’s work is that it raised questions about what was considered to be legitimate and illegitimate forms of animal and biological research. It became evident that while scientists had a broad scope for animal experimentation, artists were policed far more rigorously by the general public and art critics when they incorporated live animals into their work. Some critics argued that GFP Bunny was not just problematic; it was not even art. In Art and Fear, Paul Virilio described transgenic art as “pitiless art” because it utilizes genetic engineering, a science that Virilio sees as one of the great evils of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as a creative medium.36 Virilio is highly critical of contemporary bio-art because he sees it as a new kind of “expressionism” and “teratology,” where the monstrous is not an accident of nature or a fabrication of the artist’s imagination; rather it is a material manifestation of scientific and artistic experimentation.37 Virilio’s critique articulates an anxiety about the obliteration of the natural body and challenges to Christian humanist ideals of humanity. Ironically, the main point of Kac’s transgenic artwork is to generate debate about the ethics of biotechnologies and genetic engineering. The work is intended to create a dialogue between the artist, the creature-artwork, and the viewer.38 Kac’s art does not just exist in the creation of the genetically engineered object but also in the discussion provoked about the themes and methodologies that are integral to the production of the work. Kac’s work can be seen as a form of conceptual art with a material component. It attempts to immerse the viewer in an intellectual and emotional dialogue with the themes of his work: transgenic A-life, A-creation, and A-volution.39 In fact, it is on this level of the conceptual and dialogical that Kac’s work is most successful. In addition to contributing to the redefinition of art, bio-art transforms and relocates the art-making process. Bio-artists often collaborate with scientists in scientific laboratories during the development of their work. This collaboration symbolically replaces the romantic notion of the artist working alone in their studio with the image of the artist as experimenter and collaborator in the laboratory. Collaboration between art, technology, and science is not a new development, yet it has become more prominent in the past decade. As Oliver Grau comments in Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, there has been a “renaissance of the classic alliance between art, technology and science,” which has contributed to the emergence of particular artists who have a reputation for using new technologies and sciences as part of their creative practice.40 Working closely with scientific researchers allows bio-artists to exchange ideas and skills with scientists in the development of living art objects, while also providing artists with an opportunity to discuss the ethics of the procedures being performed in these labs. The science lab

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can become a site of dialogue about the ethics involved in experimentations with life on a genetic or cellular level and the creation of new A-life forms. In some cases, artists see their role as challenging scientists’ ideas about their own research by encouraging them to think critically about the creative and destructive potentials of their endeavors. This seems to be the case for the Perth-based art collective, Tissue Culture and Art (TC&A). The TC&A Project was initiated in 1996 and is an ongoing project that uses “tissue technologies as medium for artistic expression.”41 TC&A is currently based at SymbioticA (The Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory at the School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia). SymbioticA is an artist-run research laboratory that was established in April 2000 with the aim of acting as a site where art and biomedical sciences could interact and mingle.42 The members of the TC&A Project, Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts, are from different cultural and professional backgrounds, bringing distinct creative and technical skills to the group.43 TC&A’s tissue engineering technique involves growing cell-cultures out of skin, muscle, bone cells, and more, over a degradable biopolymer support structure. Tissue cultures are used to produce hybrid semi-living entities that exist as art objects, rather than being engineered for transplantation into another body. Thus, the artists subvert the intended use of tissue engineering by using it for creative purposes, playing provocateur within laboratory and gallery environments. In the process of producing new “semi-living” artworks, the TC&A project engages with debates about artificially created life-forms, animal testing, and the possible futures of biotechnologies. Ultimately TC&A calls into question some of the myths of scientific objectivity, rationality, and the idea that new technologies are controllable by scientists. By using biotechnologies and techniques in an alternative way, they pose the questions: What if we do something else with these technologies? And how can scientists control the outcomes of biotechnologies? TC&A’s tissue engineering is sometimes performed in portable laboratories that contain some specialized equipment, such as bioreactors, that are constructed inside gallery spaces, as was the case for the Biofeel exhibition, curated for BEAP: Biennale of Electronic Arts in Perth Australia (2000). In these settings, visitors to the gallery can peer through small porthole windows into this space while the artists engineer and nurture their cell-cultures. These bioreactors are analogous to artificial wombs where new life-forms are generated and incubated. Outside of the sterile setting of the bioreactor, these cell-cultures begin to break down and decay; they need this space to survive. Associations with artificial or technologically assisted reproduction come to mind while contemplating this productive process and one cannot help but think about current redefinitions of life. Are these cell-cultures living or undead? They may not be sentient beings, but they are certainly alive and even if their survival depends on being located in an artificial environment so too do many other living creatures. As semi-living things, do they have any rights?


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In 2002, TC&A began working on the Worry Dolls project that involved using tissue engineering techniques to design “semi-living” dolls in a bioreactor (or artificial womb). The project draws on the tale of the Guatemalan Worry Dolls. The Guatemalan Indians teach their children an old story. When you have worries you tell them to your dolls. At bedtime children are told to take one doll from the box for each worry and share their worry with that doll. Overnight, the doll will solve their worries.44

The use of the worry doll as a metaphor to deal with the anxieties surrounding biotech research and industries is interesting because it subversively challenges the blind faith that some people have in these discourses. It insinuates that many people want to believe that by closing their eyes to the issues surrounding biotech research and industries, these anxieties will simply disappear. A standard Worry Doll Kit has about six dolls in the bag, but the artists decided to fabricate more than six worry dolls because they claim that as adults we have more than six worries.45 For the Biofeel exhibition, they produced seven dolls out of skin-cell cultures surgically sutured to a biopolymer scaffold that was similar in shape to a Guatemalan Worry Doll.46 There is always an element of chance involved in how the skin cells will grow, and for this art project some of the dolls looked particularly monstrous with pointy heads and elongated limbs. They were fleshy and juicy–only vaguely resembling the cute little dolls in the Worry Doll kits (figures 9.3 and 9.4). Once the tissue culture dolls were fully grown, they were preserved in jars filled with Formalin. The jars were then displayed hanging from the ceiling in a spiral pattern—alluding to the pattern of the double helix. The preservation of these dolls in formalin and their exhibition in a public exhibition space recalled the grotesque displays in medical and natural history museums where deformed foetuses were displayed for public education and a form of macabre entertainment. The artists gave the dolls names based on the first seven letters from the English alphabet. According to Oron Catt’s catalog essay for the Biofeel exhibition, each name relates to a concern about biotechnologies and sciences.47 The names of the dolls worked with the tissue culture installation to encourage a critical level of engagement from spectators about the scientific, cultural, and economic discourses surrounding biotechnologies. Key issues alluded to through the title and content of the work included the quest for power through scientific knowledge, the capitalist and corporate nature of biotech industries, the dubious ethical history of genetic research, and the neocolonialist tendencies of DNA mapping and the Human Genome Project. It also suggests a cynicism about high levels of expectation and resources invested into biotech fields of research. In a more recent collaboration with Stelarc, TC&A worked on the Extra Ear–1/4 Scale (2003–2004) project. Stelarc proposed the idea of growing an extra ear as a soft prosthesis that could be attached to the body as an additional appendage in 1996.48 Since that time, the Extra Ear has been

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Figure 9.3


The Tissue Culture and Art. Semi-Living Dolls Display (2000).

an ongoing creative concern for Stelarc. The collaboration with TC&A has allowed Stelarc to take this proposal further by growing a series of replicas of his ear out of living cells. This project entailed the growth of a recognizable human body part, an artificial ear, out of human chondrocyte cells and animal-skin-cell cultures. A quarter-scale model of Stelarc’s ear was produced before skin was grown over the model in “a rotating micro-gravity bioreactor which allows the cells to grow in three dimensions.”49 Extra Ear–1/4 Scale confronted viewers with a miniaturized human body part that was semialive while also being separate from the body. This project was an extension of TC&A’s concerns with creating semi-living objects as artworks, while tapping into cultural and ethical debates about how we conceptualize and contend with lifelike objects that are grown and sustained through technological means. For Stelarc, this project extended his continuing project of redesigning the body through technological augmentation and alteration. Stelarc usually uses prosthetic elements as “signs of excess” rather than as signs of replacement for lacking or dysfunctional parts of the body.50 In this case, the artificial ear is detached from the body, reduced in size, and placed on display within an art gallery, operating as an ephemeral, decorative art object in its own right. Strangely enough, artificial ears are powerful signs of tissue culture engineering and biotechnologies more generally. In the mid-1990s, the earmouse appeared in scientific and cultural theory journals as a sign of a new post-organic, biotech era. Catts and Zurr claim that it was the footage of


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Figure 9.4 The Tissue Culture and Art. A Semi-Living Worry Doll. H McCoy Cell line, Biodegradable/bioabsorbable Polymers and Surgical Sutures Dimensions: 2cm x 1.5cm x 1cm. Source: From The Tissue Culture & Art(ificial) Wombs Installation, Ars Electronica (2000)

the ear-mouse that initially prompted their interest in tissue engineering as a provocative creative media. We were amazed by the confronting sculptural possibilities this technology might offer. The ear itself is a fascinating sculptural form, removed from its original context and placed on the back of a mouse; one could observe the ear in all of its sculptural glory.51

The ear-mouse is a disturbing sign of human experimentations with bioengineering and a reminder of the human-centric nature of these technologies. It is a powerful signifier for a posthuman era where boundaries between the human and the nonhuman have been completely breached. This nude mouse, with a human ear upon its back, is one of the most famous examples of a creature created for xenotransplantation, the transplantation of cells, tissues, or organs from one organism to another, usually from a nonhuman creature to a human. Xenotransplantation has emerged as a profitable scientific field partly because of the demand for organs to be transplanted into humans. Species boundaries

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are transgressed at a genetic and cellular level in the production of these donor animals, with the transplantation of various organs into human recipients blurring the imagined border between humans and animals. These experiments literalize Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of “becoming-animal.”52 Xenotransplantation suggests that, on a genetic level, engineered animals are becoming humans and, in the process of incorporating animal parts (their skin, organs, and cells) into human bodies, we are becoming animals. In this neo-biological time, humans have a symbiotic relationship with the hybrid, artificial offspring of bioscience. Living creatures such as the earmouse or doner pig are engineered for human exploitation as the potential saviors of human life and physicality.53 As such, it is important to acknowledge what they endure so that we might have an enhanced mode of existence and to consider what our responsibility of care might be for these animals and organisms. Donna Haraway has observed about the rodent sibling of the ear-mouse, Onco Mouse,54 that: s/he is our scapegoat; s/he bears our suffering; s/he signifies and enacts our morality in a powerful, historically specific way that promises a culturally privileged kind of salvation—a “cure for cancer.” Whether or not I agree to her existence and use, s/he suffers, physically, repeatedly, and profoundly, that I and my sisters might live.55

The primary intention of the Extra Ear–1/4 Scale project and most of TC&A’s projects is that they should stimulate debate about bioethical issues and concepts of life as they relate to scientifically engineered “semi-living” organisms. Zurr and Catts have made a point of stressing the political nature of the TC&A project in a number of articles and artist statements. In Zurr and Catts’ words, As artists, we believe that our role is to reveal inconsistencies in regard to our current attitudes to life and to focus attention on the discrepancies between our western cultural perceptions and the new techno-scientific understandings about life . . . our role is to further problematise ethical frameworks . . . and shift the goalposts of contemporary ethics by drawing attention to the existence of partial life and semi-living entities.56

One of the ways that TC&A problematizes ideas of living and semi-living creatures is through the “caring” and “killing rituals” involved in maintaining and ending the life of their tissue culture art works.57 Part of the responsibility of creating new bio A-life forms is the role of sustaining and caring for these (semi-)living creatures. Catts and Zurr refer to this responsibility of maintaining bio A-life as “The Aesthetics of Care.” Artists who engineer new organisms, cell-cultures, and animals as part of their creative practice are not just involved in the creation of new A-life forms; they also need to nurture, protect, feed, and maintain these organisms or cultures. When artists are no longer able to care for their semi-living entities, they need to euthanize them. TC&A calls this “the killing ritual.”


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“The killing ritual” is possibly the most affective experience for viewers faced with TC&A’s semi-living objects because of its immediacy and tactility. Audience members are invited to participate in the killing ritual by touching the tissue cultures. On exposure to human touch, the tissue cultures become contaminated by the bacteria and fungi that live in the environment and on humans. These evocative rituals bestow a meaning and value on the semi-living tissue cultures as living entities that they would otherwise be refused. Confronted with the tactility of this experience, which effectively kills the tissue culture entity, participants are forced to question whether these organisms are really living or semi-living. Paradoxically, it is during this experience of touching these tissue cultures and causing their death that participants have the strongest sense that these entities are semi-alive or undead. While they may not seem to be truly alive when viewed inside a bioreactor in a laboratory or gallery, they certainly appear to die during the killing ritual. Caring and killing rituals encourage participants to contemplate the symbolic relationships they have with animals and the environment. Furthermore, it entices participants to contemplate the responsibilities that humans have for their artificial offspring. Stelarc has extended his Extra Ear project and is currently working on Extra Ear: Ear on Arm, a soft prosthetic appendage being constructed on his forearm (figure 9.5). This left ear on the left arm is being re-functioned so that it is designed not only for listening but for transmitting sounds and messages via a miniature microphone and networked technologies. The Extra Ear will incorporate a Bluetooth transmitter that allows a wireless connection to the Internet and enables people in remote locations to listen in on what the ear is hearing. By relocating and re-purposing the ear as “an Internet organ,” the architecture of the body will become technologically extended.58 This networked appendage has the potential to be a site of interface and connectivity between remotely located individuals. Thus, it can facilitate a form of telepresence for both the artist and other networked agents. At a time when art critics seem to be asking: “what is the function of art?” and “Is it necessary any more?”—a response could be that art continues to have a function in that it can challenge and inspire us to think imaginatively, intuitively, and critically about a range of issues including the philosophical and ethical ramifications raised by our new sciences and technologies. Artists are looking at what we are or might become through new biotechnologies. They explore themes of new life and new flesh emerging out of the biological sciences and medical procedures and which provide a space for viewers to contemplate the possible aesthetic, social, and physical outcomes of scientific experiments with life at cellular and genetic levels. It is difficult to predict what the future of flesh might look like, but, clearly, ideas about what it means to be human and our relationships to our bodies have changed dramatically over the past few decades. Digital and biotechnologies are the latest in a long line of technologies that have impacted on redefinitions of humanity and life. In this post-organic age, life and flesh

Figure 9.5 (2006).

Stelarc Extra Ear: Ear On Arm London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Australia

Source: Photograph by Nina Sellars Surgical Team: Malcolm Lesavoy, MD; Sean Bidic, MD; William Futrell, MD. Project coordinator: Jeremy Taylor, October Films Funded by Discovery US


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are not necessarily organic or natural. The quest for refining and improving the human body is often driven by dominant ideals of health, beauty, fitness, strength, functionality, and the desire for longevity. Within a Western context, the pursuit of health and bodily perfection is directly linked to capitalist ideologies and economic rationalism. Fitness, prosthetics, biomedicine, and stem cell research are multibillion dollar industries. They are also normalizing discourses that approach the body as a mechanism that can be fine-tuned and repaired, seeking to produce productive bodies that contribute to capitalist economies. Ironically, the quest to perfect the human body through particular biotechnologies and methodologies also results in loss of a purely human body, if there ever was such a body. We are experiencing a collapse of boundaries between humans and other species on a cellular and molecular level. When medical devices, prosthetics, animal organs, or other animal parts are integrated into the human body, it effectively becomes a hybrid, a human-machine or human-animal cyborg. So our quest for bodily perfection and functionality is also resulting in humans becoming posthuman or transhuman. The primary aim of this essay has been to illustrate how digital and biological art practices operate as sites of social and ethical contemplation and reform regarding concepts of life, art, and bioethics. Bio-art, in particular, generates heated debate about the creation of hybrid, cross-species creatures and “semi-living” creatures for the perpetuation of human life and art. These works ask viewers to reflect on their interconnection with, and debt to, research animals and “semi-living” entities. They ask us to contemplate the human-centric nature of these experiments and to consider what our responsibilities to these new offsprings of science are. One of the strengths of digital and bio-art is that these fields are dynamic sites of dialogue, exchange, and interaction between artists, scientists, cultural theorists, audience members, and new life-forms. The artists raise some perplexing questions about emerging definitions of life and art in a neo-bio-tech era. Although artists may not have the answers to the ethical questions that their artworks raise, they do provide a space for reflection and dialogue regarding these issues.

Notes 1. Patricia Piccinini was the Australian representative at the fiftieth Venice Biennale in 2003. 2. Stelarc uses new industrial and information technologies to extend his body in his performance practice to explore the limits of the body’s capacity for managing multiple technologies at once. He has performed with various prosthetic devices, such as a third hand, a virtual arm, a virtual body, and a pneumatically powered six-legged walking machine called Exoskeleton. Unlike most prostheses that are designed to enhance the body’s operational capacities, Stelarc’s prosthetic devices seem to inhibit the body and emphasize its fragility, reinforcing his theoretical proposition that “The body is obsolete” (Stelarc 116).

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3. Catts and Zurr 2007, 232. Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr from the Tissue Culture and Art Project use the term “semi-living” to describe the tissue culture sculptures that they create as part of their artistic practice. 4. Kember 3. A number of other artists have created digital A-life systems as part of their creative practice, including Karl Sims, Tom Ray, William Latham, Troy Innocent, Robb Lovel, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, Paul Brown, Richard Brown, and Mauro Annunzianto. 5. Artists working in bio-art include Eduardo Kac, George Gessert, Mel Chin, Joe Davis, Natalie Jeremijenko, Ken Rinaldo, and the Tissue Culture and Art Project. 6. The writing of Christopher Langton, Simon Penny, Sarah Kember, Mitchell Whitelaw, and Paul Virilio will be referred to in order to tease out definitions and critiques of discourses surrounding A-life and bio-art. Cultural historians and critics such as Donna Haraway, N Katherine Hayles, and Kevin Kelly, who have sought to untangle the complicated discourses that link biology, philosophy, cybernetics, and postmodern subjectivity will be also important to this project. 7. I am thinking here of artists such as Stelarc, Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, Eduardo Kac, George Gessert, and Simon Penny, all of whom write critically about the themes and ideological discourses that their artworks deal with. 8. Clark 305. 9. Bakhtin 276. 10. Hayles http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Hayles/Simulation. html. 11. Whitelaw 207. 12. Kember 3. 13. Langton 262. 14. Kember 3. 15. Whitelaw 207. 16. Langton 262. 17. Haraway 2000, 21. 18. Kelly 1. 19. Ibid. 2. 20. Ibid. 1. 21. Hayles 1999, 2. 22. Ibid. 3. 23. Ibid. 3. 24. Benedikt 122–123. This idea of information as pure, incorporeal substance is analogous to Christian notions of the soul or spirit. Similarly, the desire for an escape from the body to a realm uncontaminated by the chaos and confusion of the actual world and corporeality has striking similarities to the Christian notion of ascending to Heaven. For more on this correlation between the myths of information technology and Christianity, see Margaret Wertheim. 25. Penny 30. 26. Ibid. 30. 27. Whitelaw 63. 28. Ibid. 63. 29. Ibid. 86. 30. Tofts 34. 31. Gessert 205.


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32. Ibid. 205. 33. Hierarchies of classification are often imbued with religious, cultural, and ethnocentric assumptions and prejudices. In 1735, Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) devised a system for classifying, ranking, and naming biological organisms, entitled Systema Naturae, which remained the dominant paradigm for classifying plants and animals for multiple generations of biologists. Linnaeus also used this system to devise biological classifications of “man,” based on racial and cultural differences. These categories were deeply racist and ethnocentric in tone, positioning white, European man as the ideal figure in this pyramid of classification. Biological and medical classificatory studies, such as Linnaeus’ project, resulted in dire social consequences for non-European and indigenous cultures, including the legitimization of colonization, nationalism, slavery, and genocide. For more on the racist nature of biological classification, see Emmanuel Eze’s Race and the Enlightenment. 34. Kac 1999, 289. 35. Kac 2004, 259. 36. Virilio 49. 37. Ibid. 49–51. 38. Kac 2004, 259. 39. In 1998–1999, Eduardo Kac created Genesis, in which Kac invented an artist’s gene from a translation of a line from the “Book of Genesis” in the King James English version of The Bible into Morse Code and then into DNA base-pairs (another code). The line asserts human dominion over other animals and everything else on Earth. This quote articulates a philosophy that is central to Western capitalist culture, namely, the idea that humans are superior to other beings on earth. It also alludes to the history of English colonialism that emerged around the same time that this version of The Bible was translated into English and the fact that Christian ideas of dominion were used to legitimate the invasion of different lands and the assimilation and genocide of indigenous people. Kac’s work implies continuity between this ideology of dominion and new technologies. 40. Grau 297. 41. Catts and Zurr 2007, 232. 42. Bunt and Catts. 43. Ionat Zurr studied photography and media studies, specializing in biological and digital imaging. She describes herself as a “Wet Biology Art Practitioner” (The TC&A project Web site). Oron Catts is an artist and curator who is also the Artistic Director of SymbioticA. Zurr and Catts are the cofounders of The TC&A Project. Further information about SymbioticA can be found by visiting its official Web site. 44. Catts, Zurr and Ary. 45. Ibid. 46. There is also an ongoing electronic element in the Worry Doll project, which allows people to visit the TC&A Web site and communicate their worries to the worry dolls via an e-mail message. 47. “Doll A = Stands for the worry from Absolute truths, and of the people who think they hold them. Doll B = Represents the worry of Biotechnology, and the forces that drive it (see Doll C). Doll C = Stands for Capitalism, Corporations.

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48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

E dw i n a B a r t l e m Doll D = Stands for Demagogy, and possible Destruction. Doll E = Stands for Eugenics and the people who think that they are superior enough to practice it. Doll F = Is the fear of Fear itself. Doll G = Is not a Doll as the Genes are present in all semi-living dolls. Doll H = Symbolizes our fear of Hope.” (Zurr, Catts and Ary) The original proposal can be seen on Stelarc’s Extra Ear–1/4 Scale project Web site. The TC&A Web site. Stelarc 2000, 561–562. Catts and Zurr 2003. Deleuze and Guattari 249. Engineering hybrid animals for human survival or benefit is not a new phenomenon, but I want to emphasize the anthropocentric nature of transgenics, xenotransplantation, and animals engineered for scientific experimentation. Onco Mouse is the genetically engineered laboratory mouse used for studying cancer (especially breast cancer). Haraway 1997, 223–224. Catts and Zurr 2003. Zurr and Catts 169. Stelarc 2008, 102.

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Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Translated by Gloria Custance. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003. Gessert, George. 1993, “Notes of Genetic Art.” Leonardo 26. 3 (1993): 205–211. Eze, Emmanuel. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Haraway, Donna. “Mice Into Wormholes / A Comment on the Nature of No Nature.” In Cyborgs and Citadels, edited by Gary Lee Downey and Joseph Dumit. 209–243. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 1997. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Posthumanism: Readers in Cultural Criticism, edited by Neil Badmington. 69–84. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2000. Kac, Eduardo. “Transgenic Art.” In Ars Electronica 99—Life Science, edited by Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schopf. 289–296. Vienna and New York: Springer, 1999. Kac, Eduardo. “Transgenic Art on Line.” In Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information, edited by Robert Mitchell and Phillip Thurtle. 259–262. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Kelly, Kevin. Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994. Kember, Sarah. Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Langton, Christopher. “Artificial Life.” In Ars Electronica: Facing the Future, edited by Timothy Druckrey and Ars Electronica. 261–268. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Penny, Simon. “The Virtualisation of Art Practice.” Art Journal 56. 3 (Fall 1997): 30–38. Stelarc. “Extra Ear: Ear on Arm.” In sk-interfaces: Exploding Borders-Creating Membranes in Art, Technology and Society, edited by Jens Hauser. 102–105. Liverpool: FACT and Liverpool University Press, 2008. Stelarc. “From Psycho-Body to Cyber-Systems: Images as Post-human Entities.” In Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology and Post-Human Pragmatism, edited by Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric J. Cassidy. 116–123. London: Routledge, 1998. Stelarc. “From Psycho-Body to Cyber-Systems: Images as Post-Human Entities.” In The Cybercultures Reader, edited by David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. 561–562. New York: Routledge, 2000. Tofts, Darren. Parallax: Essays on Art, Culture and Technology. North Ryde: Craftsmen House, 1999. Virilio, Paul. Art and Fear. Translated by Julie Rose. London: Continuum, 2003. Wertheim, Margaret. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace. Sydney, Auckland, Toronto, New York and London: Doubleday, 1999. Whitelaw, Michael. Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2004. Zurr, Ionat and Oran Cats 2004, “The Ethical Claims of Bioart: Killing the Other or Self-Cannibalism.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art: Art and Ethics 5.1 (2004): 167–188.

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Fl esh i ng Ou t Vi rt ua l Bodi es: Wh i t e H e t e rose x ua l M a sc u l i n i t y i n C on t e m p or a ry C y be r fa n ta s y C i n e m a Nicola Rehling

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Refiguring the Flesh: From Cyborgs to Virtual Bodies

cience fiction cinema of the 1980s and early 1990s was dominated by the figure of the cyborg, a hybrid fusion of metal and flesh. For Donna Haraway, writing in 1985, the cyborg offered a powerful image of a human body refigured by technology and a model of postmodern, nonessentialist, postgendered subjectivity. However, far from being postgendered, most cinematic cyborgs have been hypermasculine, epitomized by the Aryan-looking, muscle-bound Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator (dir. James Cameron, 1984), thus bearing out Mary Anne Doane’s observation that “[w]hen technology intersects with the body in the realm of representation, the question of sexual difference,” and I would add racial difference, “is inevitably involved.”1 Claudia Springer has argued that these phallic cyborgs represent a nostalgic return to “anachronistic industrial-age” images of “externally forceful masculine machinery,” and constitute a disavowal of the cultural association of electronic culture with the feminine stemming from electronic technology’s minuteness, fluidity, and “concealed, passive, and internal workings.”2 In a similar vein, Samantha Holland suggests that hypergendered cyberbodies attempt “to counter the threat that cyborgs indicate the loss of human bodies, where such a loss implies the loss of the gendered distinctions that are essential to maintaining the patriarchal order.”3 If Holland is right, what can be made of the fantasies of virtual disembodiment that have dominated popular science fiction cinema since the mid1990s? By the end of the millennium, Schwarzenegger’s terminator was dislodged as the iconic figure of the genre by The Matrix’s (dir. Wachowski bros., 1999) Neo (Keanu Reeves), whose slimmer, flexible, virtual body has more in common with Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s (dir. James Cameron, 1991) shape-shifting, liquid-metal T1000—rendered monstrous through

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his instability, formlessness, leakiness, and thus implicit feminization— than Schwarzenegger’s solid, bounded, outdated, yet ultimately triumphant model. However, while at first sight this shift might seem to usher in a welcome change in representations of normative masculinity, as Anne Balsamo has pointed out, “the gendered boundary between male and female is one border that remains heavily guarded despite new technologized ways to rewrite the physical body in the flesh.”4 Racial difference, as I hope to show, is another such rigorously policed border. Indeed, most contemporary cinematic cyberfantasies deploy Christian and Cartesian discourses of transcending the flesh, discourses that are imbricated in ideologies of gender and race, which are put in the service of reinscribing hegemonic norms. Moreover, despite technophilic arguments that virtual reality will liberate us from the confines of the material body, in the rather different affair of cinematic representations of virtual reality, identity is still inescapably imprinted on the flesh (however virtual) of characters, whose bodies are always caught up in existing hierarchical arrangements—as the positioning of white males as heroic messiahs in both The Terminator and The Matrix trilogies underscores. In this essay, I attempt to flesh out the virtual bodies of white heterosexual males in contemporary cinematic cyberfantasies. As the universal subjectivity, white heterosexual masculinity has historically acquired the privilege of representing itself as disembodied in a visual economy in which only those bodies that are particularized and marked acquire significance. It is precisely this asymmetrical arrangement that lends political urgency to unveiling “the unmarked and invisible, but no less specific, corporeality that hides beneath the abstraction of universality.”5 However, although disembodiment has been a great source of representational strength for white masculinity, allowing it to act as the universal category, it is also grounds for anxiety since it results in a concomitant loss of embodied subjectivity. In the United States, this anxiety has been compounded of late by the rhetoric of identity politics, which invests in the minoritized body and valorizes difference, resulting in a host of anxieties that North American white heterosexual masculinity, as the dominant norm, is what Thomas DiPiero terms “a hysterical response to a perceived lack of identity.”6 One response to this anxiety on the terrain of politics and popular cinema has been the much documented emergence of “the white male as victim” figure, whereby straight white men, both on and off screen, proclaim themselves to be America’s newest marginalized group, having fallen victim primarily to feminism and affirmative action policies. These appeals to victim status, evident in films as diverse as First Blood (dir. Ted Kotcheff, 1982), Falling Down (dir. Joel Schumacher, 1993) and Fight Club (dir. David Fincher, 1999), have been regarded by many theorists to work on the common correlation of victimhood with innocence, thus distancing the dominant identity from the role of oppressor and endowing it with positive content, shoring up white heterosexual male hegemony in the process.7 Another development, however, has been the use of images of hypernormative white heterosexual masculinity to explore anxieties about the depthless,

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vacuous, postmodern subject, evident in serial killer movies such as Copycat (dir. Jon & Harron Amiel, 1995) and American Psycho (dir. Mary Harron, 2000), but most prevalent in cyberfantasies.8 In these films, the fleshless, disembodied realm of cyberspace is primarily represented by straight white men, while women and people of color often stand in for the Baudrillardian “real.” Fusion with the matrix, however, is often coded through monstrous imagery of the female body, which no doubt accounts for the common motif of white male transcendence over technology in narrative closure, but which also articulates anxieties about the ramifications of a high-tech age for normative masculinity.

Virtual Flesh and Identity in Cyberculture Precisely because virtual reality is “a virtual object of discourse, in the sense that its conceptualization runs ahead of its material forms,” 9 there is no critical consensus concerning its impact on embodied subjectivity. Many cybertheorists wax lyrical about the radical potential of cyber- and virtual culture to unshackle us from the constraints of the flesh. In this respect, virtual culture is considered to foreground the performativity of identity, thereby deconstructing ontological discourses that anchor the “truth” of identity in the body.10 This particularly applies to the categories of gender and race, which are commonly believed to be indelibly inscribed on the flesh. In short, as Scott Bukatman puts it, “[v]irtual reality has become the very embodiment of postmodern disembodiment,”11 producing a proliferation of utopian discourses of identity free-play, according to which gender, race, age, ability, and class can be put on and taken off at will. However, such heady celebrations of freedom from the flesh, dubbed “cyberdrool” by Bukatman,12 all too easily sidestep material considerations. Many theorists, for instance, point to the demographics of access to cyberculture, noting that much of humanity is still left “at the mercy of real reality.”13 Others note that one cannot simply shed existing social categories the moment one enters cyberspace. Lisa Nakamura, for example, writing specifically of race, expresses concern that the “identity tourism” that role-playing Internet sites and virtual reality games facilitate tends to reinscribe preexisting stereotypes.14 Theorists as diverse as Vivian Sobchack, Rosi Braidotti, Slavoj Žižek, and Anne Balsamo have also pointed out that it is no coincidence that fascination with escaping the flesh has emerged at a time when the body is seen as increasingly vulnerable to disease, surveillance, and identity critiques.15 Fantasies of virtual reality can pander to the Cartesian fantasy of doing away with the body altogether, best expressed by the cyberpunk motif of leaving “the meat” behind—a fantasy in which the body is little more than “excess baggage for the cyberspace traveller.”16 This “contempt for the flesh,” as William Gibson puts it in his seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer,17 deeply troubles many theorists, who express concern about the disdain for the materiality of the human body that these technophilic desires for transcendence articulate.18 Moreover, as Allucquère Rosanne

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Stone notes, “[f]orgetting about the body is an old Cartesian trick, one that has unpleasant consequences for those bodies whose speech is silenced by the act of our forgetting; that is to say, those upon whose labour the act of forgetting the body is founded—usually women and minorities.”19

White Male Disembodiment: The Legacy of Western Metaphysics Feminist philosophy and Derridean deconstruction have traced the ways in which the mind/body dualism of Western metaphysical thought privileges rationality, gendered masculine, over embodiment, gendered feminine. Elizabeth Spelman, for instance, has traced how Plato’s degradation of the feminine is inextricable from his disdain for the body, which he frequently likened to a prison, tomb, or grave of the immaterial soul.20 Plato asserted that the body “takes away from us the power of thinking at all,”21 though “us” in his account undoubtedly referred to moneyed, adult males, since he frequently represented women, along with slaves, free laborers, children, and animals as lacking the capacity for reason.22 Whereas Plato had argued that “the living body is permeated by the soul, which can only depart the body at death,”23 the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes argued that the mind and body are mutually exclusive entities (though he conceded that they interact), declaring that “it is certain that I am really distinct from my body and that I can exist without it.”24 Descartes’s dualism, rationalism, and valorization of objectivity have resulted in his influential philosophy being termed “the pure masculinisation of thought.”25 Cartesianism was not only indebted to Ancient Greek metaphysics, however, but also the latter’s fusion with Christianity during the Middle Ages. Christianity is a notoriously somatophobic religion, despite the paradox that the white male body stretched out on the crucifix is the basis of Western Christian iconography.26 The hierarchized spirit/flesh dualism of Christian discourse is also enmeshed in sexual and racial ideologies. Women are often associated with the sins of the flesh; menstruation, for instance, has historically been interpreted as Eve’s curse. Moreover, as Richard Dyer argues, Christianity has also contributed to the association of whiteness with spirituality and, by extension, something beyond the corporeal. This is not to suggest that Christianity is an essentially “white” religion, but to posit it as one of the prime discourses of white superiority deployed by European colonialist and imperialist practices.27 Such discourses condemned indigenous people of color to “the prisonhouse of epidermal inferiority,”28 regarding them to be in need of spiritual enlightenment in order to control the impulses of the flesh. Even today, the commonly held assumption is that blacks are more “physical” than whites, not only in terms of their mythical, hyperbolic sexuality but also their alleged “natural,” superior athleticism. The majority of cinematic cyberfantasies self-consciously invoke the mind/body split, even if to resignify it.29 In theory, as Bukatman points out, in cyberspace “the duality between mind and body is superseded in a


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new formation that presents the mind as itself embodied,” “construct[ing] a body at once material and immaterial—a fundamental oxymoron, perhaps, of postmodernity.”30 Likewise, Dani Cavallaro notes that cyberpunk fiction often dissolves “the binary opposition between wired corporeality and organic corporeality,” requiring the physical body “to reassess the meaning of its concreteness by negotiating with its immaterial counterparts.”31 Certainly, in most cinematic cyberfantasies, the jacked-in material body responds physically to experiences that befall the virtual self, as we see in The Matrix, in which Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), the leader of the human resistance, informs Neo that death in the matrix means death in “real life” since “the body cannot live without the mind.” For Peter X. Feng, this aspect of the film provides a “welcome corrective to Baudrillard’s celebration of cyberpunk as a means to transcend bodily materiality and deny mortality.”32 Nonetheless, Morpheus’s assertion is ultimately undermined when the messianic Neo is resurrected in the matrix, affirming total disembodiment to be a white male privilege. In the remainder of this chapter, I will focus on two fin-de-millennium cyberfantasies, Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow 1995) and The Matrix, both of which screen an apocalyptic vision of cyberculture, articulating anxieties about simulation, hyperreality, and fragmented postmodern subjectivity through the white male protagonist, who is played off against the more grounded subjectivities of his gendered and raced others. Both films screen women and people of color in substantial roles, as the voice of ethics and/or spirituality, while white masculinity is posited as a blank, depthless subjectivity—though one waiting to be redeemed. The representation of simulation technology is articulated through the Cartesian tradition in the case of Strange Days and the Christian tradition in the case of The Matrix. In both texts, this works to stabilize sexual and racial difference in a virtual realm where, theoretically at least, such differences are rendered obsolete.

Recycling the Cartesian Legacy: STR ANGE DAYS Strange Days, a techno-noir action movie, has received sustained critical attention for its knowing inversion of both gender and genre norms—a Kathryn Bigelow trademark—and its self-conscious interrogation of the sadistic, (white) male gaze.33 The in-the-near-future (at least at the time of release) narrative revolves around a wireless apparatus, SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device), otherwise known as playback, which, when attached to the skull, can download neural impulses in the brain onto disc format. While this technology is, strictly speaking, not virtual, in that a surrogate actually undergoes the original experience, other users can later jack into these recorded clips, which simulate the original wearer’s visual, aural, tactile, and psychosensual experiences. SQUID is thus like “simstim” technology in Neuromancer, which Case, the protagonist, scathingly refers to as “a meat toy” since it fails to liberate users fully from the “prison” of the flesh, even if that flesh belongs to someone else.34

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The film represents playback as a white male obsession. Women and people of color, who tend to feature on the other side of the SQUID apparatus, seem less able and willing to escape their enfleshed selves. No men of color use playback, except for one stereotypical Japanese businessman, whose stateof-the-art hardware articulates anxieties about Asian technological superiority. His wealthy appearance also underscores that the consumption of playback, like any other commodity, is inextricable from class and economic status. The only women to jack in do so not for pleasure but at male bequest. All the major white male characters of the film, conversely, are addicted to SQUID. The protagonist, Lenny (Ralph Fiennes), a peddler of black-market clips, defends his sleazy, parasitical profession to Mace (Angela Bassett), the film’s African-American action heroine, by arguing that playback facilitates an exploration of our “dark side” (seemingly with no awareness of the racial connotations), protecting the body in a world where even sex can kill you. The film also suggests potential beneficial effects of cybertechnology, screening an amputee experiencing the sensation of jogging along a beach. However, as techno-noir, Strange Days is far more interested in the psychosexual uses to which it is put by its white male characters. For instance, we witness one of Lenny’s middle-class clients in a state of rapturous ecstasy as he tests out a clip of a teenage girl having a shower. The film thus points to the potential challenge that virtual culture offers to embodied subjectivity, as well as hinting at a white male desire to be liberated from the constraints of normative masculinity. At the same time, as a commercial enterprise, where surrogate wearers are paid like porn stars for their performances, SQUID enables (white male) users to colonize the flesh of their others whilst retaining their own psychosensual responses and thus full awareness of the power that inheres in that position. This is made particularly clear in a traumatic scene in which the film’s killer jacks his female victim into a SQUID device so that she not only witnesses her own rape and strangulation but also simultaneously experiences the killer’s sadistic titillation, which in turn heightens her fear, thus fuelling his warped excitement. Most importantly, the white male can experience “a bit of the other,” all without putting his own material body at risk from injury, infection, or social disadvantage. Strange Days thus suggests that new ways of experiencing the flesh will still be traversed by existing power relations. However, the film’s inscription of simulation technology as a straight white male fixation also articulates a lack of interiority and authenticity in the white male SQUID junkies. This anxiety is underscored through the manner in which Lenny is self-consciously played off against Mace, who represents embodied presence. Lenny’s slim body is pasty-white and acutely vulnerable, the suggestion being that his passive immersion in cyberculture has resulted in a loss of the physical values of masculinity. Indeed, Lenny is repeatedly rescued by Mace, whose sculptured flesh, pumped-up body, and combative skills signify authenticity in accordance with the generic conventions of the action movie. Her physicality is thus inextricable from her


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vehement opposition to playback. In a moment of utter frustration, she lectures Lenny: “This is your life. Right here, right now. It’s real time, you hear me? Real time, time to get real. Not playback.” This appeal to the “real” of corporal presence might position Mace as “the moral centre of the film,” as Bigelow intended,35 but it simultaneously posits her as the antithesis to technology and yokes her to historical discourses of black female hyperembodiment. At the same time, as Paul Gormley notes, “it fabricates AfricanAmerican people and culture as a place where there is a knowledge of a reality underneath the surface simulation of white Symbolic structures,” a racial encoding that is also apparent in The Matrix.36 Strange Days also repeats the prevalent notion in cyberpunk texts that people of color are “more grounded and able to heal white people careening out of control,”37 evident in Lenny’s eventual redemption when he recognizes his desire for Mace and turns his back on playback. Mace’s unwillingness to divest herself of her enfleshed identity is also linked to her investment in the body as a site of politicized identity, and her awareness that the body one happens to possess, however socially constructed, entails concrete, material effects. Lenny, on the other hand, shows little concern at the racial injustice that surrounds him, and, in any case, cannot appeal to his race or gender as a site of positive political identity—though he is certainly represented as a victimized (and therefore redeemable) white male through his masochistic relationship with the film’s femme fatale, the ironically named Faith (Juliette Lewis).38 In this respect, the readiness with which all white males in the film colonize the bodies of their others is suggestive of both the privileges and also the anxieties that accompany normative masculinity: inhabiting the universal identity, whose alleged lack of particularity promotes the illusion of disembodiment, has as a flip-side the fear that white masculinity is an empty, sterile identity. At the same time, in a film that self-consciously restages the Rodney King affair, revealing that even in the cyberfuture a “racially saturated field of visibility” still inscribes race (and racial inferiority) indelibly on the flesh,39 Lenny’s Cartesian trips may also signal a white male “desire to return to the ‘neutrality’ of the body”40 now that identity critiques have forced attention on those previously barred from humanist constructions of the subject, and in so doing have rendered the universal, disembodied status of the moneyed, white, heterosexual male increasingly untenable.

THE M ATRIX : Transcending the Flesh Unlike Strange Days, The Matrix screens women and people of color as equally able to disembody themselves in order to enter the virtual realm, though none are capable of the flesh-defying feats performed by Neo, the only human capable of triumphing over the matrix, an interactive computer programme that simulates reality, rendering humans oblivious to their subjugation by machines. The machines feed off the energy generated by human bodies plugged into fields of womb-like extracting devices; in an ironic twist of fate, humans have been reduced to mere batteries.

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As with the earlier cyberfantasy The Lawnmower Man (dir. Brett Leonard, 1992), The Matrix is packed with Christian allusions;41 indeed, entire Web sites have been dedicated to their decoding, the film’s “virtual Christianity” tapping into the current resurgence of U.S. evangelicalism. Neo (an anagram of the “one”) is resurrected in The Matrix, brings Trinity (CarrieAnne Moss) back from the dead in The Matrix Reloaded (dir. Wachowski bros., 2003), and sacrifices himself in a crucifixion-like scene in order to save humanity in The Matrix Revolutions (dir. Wachowski bros., 2003). Despite the associations of her name, Trinity fulfills the function of Mary of Magdalene in a typically irreverent, postmodern reworking of master narratives. Morpheus’s multicultural crew represent the Disciples, especially the aptly named Cypher (Joe Pantoliano), who, Judas-like, betrays Neo to the authorities—in this case the agents that patrol the matrix, seeking out those freed humans that infiltrate the system. These Christian references are also mixed with references to Ancient Greek mythology, as well as Eastern philosophies. Despite this postmodern hybridity, it is notable that in the first film all the central characters with Christian allegorical functions, Neo, Trinity, and Cypher, are white, while the two key African-American characters bear Ancient Greek names (though the sequels also give Hellenic names to white characters): Morpheus is named after the Greek God of dreams, while Neo’s coming has been predicted by the Oracle (Gloria Foster),42 a homely, cookie-baking, supremely wise black woman, who, like so many African-Americans in popular representations, acts as the guardian of a lost spirituality, and uses her magical powers to help white folk.43 Thus, despite the trilogy’s obvious effort to include a multicultural cast, certain racial norms are reinscribed in the association of Christianity with whiteness (though destabilized in the association of Hellenism with blackness) and the assignation of the messiah, the sole character able to overcome the frailties of the flesh, as a “white” male, blindly followed by Morpheus and, in the sequels, worshipped by many of the multicultural inhabitants of Zion. I place “white” in inverted commas because the complexities of racial identity are particularly apparent in the case of Keanu Reeves, revealing that whiteness, as with all racial identities, is a social construct that can never be written across the flesh with epistemological certainty. Although in interviews Reeves self-identifies as white, in actual fact his father is Hawaiian-Chinese (his mother is white British). For that reason, according to Feng, “Asian American spectators frequently label Reeves as Asian Pacific passing as white.”44 In most of his films, Reeves is certainly positioned as white, a key example being his casting as the Victorian Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1992). In The Matrix, despite the arguable deployment of his Asian roots in the martial arts sequences, he is significantly “whitened,” given the Anglo-Saxon name Thomas A. Anderson; and, as if to hammer this fact home, he is even told at one point by his friend Choi (Marc Gray) that he is looking “even whiter than usual.”


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Of course, within the logic of the virtual reality narrative, differences that are imprinted on the body theoretically become immaterial in the matrix. Unlike Strange Days, men and women of color frequently disembody themselves in order to enter the Matrix, though none, of course, are capable of the flesh-defying feats that Neo performs. The Matrix also flirts with gender instability in its screening of Trinity, a cyberpunk sidekick turned action heroine, whom Neo had first assumed to be male because of her exceptional hacking skills. In the virtual realm, of course, muscles are rendered obsolete, which also works to give Trinity’s physical prowess narrative justification. Neo and Trinity also look remarkably similar in the matrix: both have short black hair, both wear sunglasses, black latex suits and leather boots, and both handle phallic weaponry (however virtual) with ease. In other words, the “residual self images,” as Morpheus puts it, that Neo and Trinity assume in the matrix are both culturally understood as masculine, no doubt functioning much like the armored body of the cyborg, warding off the threat of potentially feminizing digital technology. Moreover, the gender dynamics of fairytale conventions are also reversed when Neo (whose name suggests him to be a “New Man” action hero) is resurrected by a kiss from Trinity, though in the sequel he returns the favor. Virtual bodies are also freed from physical limitations, as witnessed in the breathtaking, fast-cut, gravity-defying, computer game-style action sequences that paradoxically offer up cinema at its most visceral. In fact, Neo’s superiority is played out through his speed, malleability, and grace in balletic combat sequences that cite the skillfully choreographed fight sequences of martial arts cinema. The fact that these virtual bodies are externalizations of the human nervous system allows for a reading that underscores the performativity of gender. As Judith Butler has argued, once “gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice” that is no longer anchored in the body, it is freed up from the heterosexual matrix,45 and Neo’s fetishistic leather gear, combined with Keanu Reeves’s gay icon status, certainly lends the film to a queer reading. Thus, as Jenny Wolmark has remarked, “leaving the ‘meat’ behind does not serve to obliterate all the contradictions inherent in culturally constructed masculinity, nor does it enable a less compromised virtual masculinity to be enacted in cyberspace.”46 At the same time, revelling in intertextual allusions (despite its ostensible thematic anxieties about hyperreality), The Matrix also screens more conventional representations of Hollywood masculinity in its parodic recycling of the generic conventions of the western, such as the shoot-outs, fetishistic shots of guns, leather and hands ready to draw, and newspaper blowing across the ground like tumbleweed—Neo is, after all, in cyberpunk jargon, a “console cowboy.” Moreover, certain hegemonic norms are reinscribed not only through the conventions of the action genre (both Morpheus and Trinity are rescued by Neo) but also through recourse to an older, transcendental discourse of disembodiment that marks the “white” male Neo as hero: Christianity. And as Sharon Willis points out, “[w]hether we are speaking

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of race, of gender, or of sexuality, fictive constructions and fantasies lend historical and material force to the matter of difference.”47 Neo’s role as white male messiah, however, also performs another ideological function, providing Neo, who is played off against the enigmatic Morpheus and equally intriguing Trinity, with a particularized identity: that of the “saviour of mankind,” a role that staves off anxieties about the emptiness of white heterosexual masculinity that currently circulate in popular cultural representations. As plain Thomas A. Anderson, a computer programmer, encased in a white plastic cubicle in the uniform world of corporate America, Neo looked little different from the agents, who are represented by an overdetermined image of extraordinarily ordinary white masculinity: they all have the commonest Anglo-Saxon names imaginable—Mr. Smith, Mr. Brown, Mr. Jones—and they all share blank expressions, identical suits, ties, tiepins and sunglasses. This doubling of Neo with the agents, particularly in The Matrix Revolutions, when Agent Smith, who has learnt to selfproliferate, attempts to clone Neo, informing him that he has become Neo’s “negative,” is much aided not only by Reeves’s infamous wooden delivery of lines but also his vacuous star persona, with Reeves often described “as a kind of pure, blank surface, lacking all depth”48 —all of which render him the apotheosis of the two-dimensional cybersubject. J. P. Telotte has observed that images of an “empty human nature” in science fiction cinema are generally masculine.49 Dyer has also argued that the very ordinariness of whiteness means that it cannot escape implications of nonexistence, meaninglessness, and sterility, illustrating his argument with reference to the white male androids that dominate science fiction cinema.50 The Western city that Neo enters in the training program is also populated solely by whites,51 all dressed in black suits, except for a blond woman in red who is designed to distract him. This contrasts starkly with the highly multicultural city of Zion, the last human city, which features in the sequels, where racial difference becomes a signifier of humanity. In the influential Tron (dir. Steven Lisberger, 1982) and more recent Virtuosity (dir. Brett Leonard, 1995), computer programmes are also represented by white heterosexual men. In the latter film, a chillingly sadistic computer program (Russell Crowe), comprised of the profile of over 200 serial killers, is played off against his passionate, grounded, black, human adversary (Denzel Washington). Similar racial dynamics are evident in The Matrix Reloaded: the architect of the matrix (Helmut Bakaitis), an Aryan-looking man with white hair and a white beard, dressed in a white suit, is contrasted with the oracle, who complicates the association of cyberspace with white masculinity when it emerges that she is also a computer program (though one that sides with the human resistance and preaches the doctrine of “choice”), but realigns black femininity with the body through her enjoyment of physical pleasures such as smoking and eating cookies, albeit within the simulated realm of the matrix. Agent Smith, on the other hand, has nothing but contempt for the flesh. For example, in The Matrix Revolutions, when he enters the material body of a human resistance fighter, he utters with total revulsion: “It’s difficult even to think encased in


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this rotting piece of meat. The stink of it filling every breath, a suffocating cloud you can’t escape. Disgusting.” This representation of normative white masculinity as the antithesis of the flesh, an association that is inextricable from the universal identity’s historical claims to noncorporeality, is of course further represented through Neo’s defiance of death in the matrix, though his messianic status insulates him from the concomitant anxieties about white masculinity’s potential vacuity and lack of self-distinction, anxieties that are safely projected onto the agents.

Fusing with the Matrix: Pre-Oedipal Imagery and the Monstrous Feminine The fact that the figure of white heterosexual masculinity is repeatedly called upon to represent not only anxieties about the depthless, postmodern cybersubject but also human transcendence over the technological is some indication of the threat that virtual culture poses to traditional configurations of white male mastery. Indeed, while The Matrix’s agents, as with its human virtual bodies, offer a defensively masculine image of electronic space, at the same time, both the repressed flesh and the repressed feminine (which the film presents as inextricably linked) violently return in the film’s screening of abject pre-Oedipal imagery in order to represent fusion with the matrix. As Claudia Springer and Deborah Lupton have argued, electronic technology shares many characteristics with cultural representations of the female body—it is miniature, mysterious, dark, leaky, vulnerable to contamination, a site of intense emotional security but also terrifying engulfment.52 Indeed, the etymological root of the word “matrix” is the Latin “mater” meaning both “mother” and “womb.” However, as Amanda Fernbach points out, it is important to stress that it is not so much that submersion into the matrix replicates the pre-Oedipal symbiotic relationship between mother and child, but rather, that familiar narratives are put into play as with the redeployment of Cartesian and Christian discourses in these films, due to the absence of narratives with which to describe masculinity in a new high-tech world.53 With self-conscious intertextual allusions to Alien (dir. Ridley Scott, 1979), The Matrix encodes fusion with the matrix through abject images that Barbara Creed, in her Kristevian reading of horror films, has termed the “monstrous feminine.”54 The film thus inscribes at the level of mise-en-scène the sexual difference binary that its tough action heroines and technological advances destabilize. A bald, naked Neo awakens to find himself in a wombshaped sac, submerged in viscous fluid, his fetus-like body penetrated by wires resembling umbilical cords, which, far from nurturing him, drain off his energy. His liberation from the matrix is then figured as a birth; he shoots through a labyrinth of dark, slippery, vaginal passages, landing in a pool of water from which he is rescued by Morpheus’s ship. Earlier, before his liberation, his body in the matrix had also been infiltrated by a bug that Agent Smith injected into his naval (the place from which children often think babies emerge); Trinity again penetrates him to remove the bug in a

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monstrous image of male labour that cites the famed scene in Alien in which Kane (John Hurt) gives birth to the alien gestating inside him. Entering the matrix from Morpheus’s ship also requires penetration through a bioport at the back of the neck, though the film also suggests the pleasures of passively submitting to technology when Neo, lying inert, strapped into his chair, gasps orgasmically when he is jacked in. However, as Cynthia Freeland points out, now that Neo is no longer subjugated by the matrix, this is an example of “good penetration” since it is clean and unmessy.55 For Freeland, this forms part of the film’s fantasy of overcoming the flesh, evident in the latex costumes that the characters wear in the matrix, and, of course, Neo’s eventual ability to dodge bullets and vanquish death.56 Rosi Braidotti reads the male desire to jack into cyberspace similarly, noting how it facilitates an “escape from the maternal site of reproduction of the enfleshed self, in favor of integration in the abstract circuit of a collectively managed electronic matrix linked to a central point of consciousness.”57 The Matrix’s screening of “monstrous feminine” imagery suggests that the repressed, as Freud taught us, will always return. Indeed, cyberfeminist Sadie Plant has gone as far to argue that “[t]here is no escape from the meat, the flesh, and cyberspace is nothing transcendent . . . to jack into cyberspace is not to penetrate, but to be invaded.”58 For Plant, writing in the playful, parodic, but arguably essentialist mode of Luce Irigaray, cyberspace not only challenges male mastery and self-distinction, but is also a system that is “female and dangerous.”59 However, rather than declaring the future female, as if it were a fait accompli, it would be more productive to think through the ways in which anxieties about gender relations and male passivity in the high-tech age are articulated through images of feminine flesh mapped across male bodies. These images abound in cyberfantasies, a key example being eXistenZ (dir. David Cronenberg, 1999), where the male protagonist (Jude Law) is shocked to learn that, in order to fuse with virtual reality, he has to massage breast-shaped pods called “umbycords” that are plugged directly into the human nervous system, and have the base of his spine fitted with a vagina-like bioport, which requires stimulation when not in use. Nevertheless, it is important to note that these films tend to represent the alleged feminization of technology in a cautionary rather than celebratory mode, positing female flesh as a site of abject monstrosity, primarily through portraying it through the point of view of horrified male characters. Thus, as Springer reminds us, “feminine metaphors for technology are not necessarily feminist.”60 These films thus screen what Braidotti has termed the paradox of the “simultaneous overexposure and disappearance of the body”;61 while they stage the fantasy of virtual disembodiment, the ideologies of gender and race attached to the bodies they depict confirm that bodies are unavoidably saturated with meanings, underscoring the difficulty of escaping what Patrick Fuery, in another context, has termed the “mise-en scène of flesh.”62 As I hope to have shown, despite the significant roles allotted to women and people of color, most cyberfantasies support Balsamo’s observation that


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“[t]here is plenty of evidence to suggest that a reconstructed body does not guarantee a reconstructed cultural identity. Nor does ‘freedom from a body’ imply that people exercise the ‘freedom to be’ any kind of body than the one they already enjoy or desire.”63 Whatever the utopian claims about cyber- and virtual culture liberating us from the flesh, most popular cinematic representations of virtual reality still find ways of inscribing difference and maintaining hegemonic norms, primarily through recycling Cartesian and Christian discourses. In the case of representations of white heterosexual masculinity in films such as Strange Days and The Matrix, which ultimately screen white male transcendence over technology, the dominant identity may well be represented as terminal in all senses of the word (technologized, sterile, empty, in crisis), but it can still find ways of redeeming itself.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

Doane 163. Springer 1996, 104, 111–112. Holland 159. Balsamo 217. Wiegman 1995, 6. DiPiero 117. For a discussion of “the white male as victim” in popular cinema, see Savran; Robinson; and Fradley. For a discussion of this trend in serial killer movies, see Rehling. Bignell 15. For example, see Rheingold; Foster 1995; Foster 2000; Plant 1993. Bukatman 188. Ibid. 189. Sardar 739. Nakamura 714. Sobchack 1992, 300; Braidotti 1994, 60; Žižek 104; Balsamo 229. Balsamo 229. Gibson 6. Sobchack 1995, 211. Stone 525. Spelman 114. Plato 65, quoted in Bordo 93. Spelman 119. Bordo 93. Descartes 62. Stern 104. Dyer 15–16. As Dyer is quick to point out, “one of [Christianity’s] foundational thinkers was the North African Augustine, and . . . [Christianity] is now most alive in Africa, South America and the black churches of Europe and North America” (ibid. 17). But Christianity has significantly marked Western-European consciousness, and its Manichean dualisms were mapped onto racial difference, reinforcing the doctrines of racial superiority and imperialism (ibid. 17). Wiegman 1995, 11.

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29. Indeed, The Thirteenth Floor (dir. Joseph Rusnak, 1999) even opens with Descartes’s founding declaration: “I think therefore I am.” 30. Bukatman 208. 31. Cavallaro 28–29, 23. 32. Feng 154. 33. For example, see Lane’s article “The Strange Days of Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron.” 34. Gibson 55. 35. Bigelow, quoted in Fuller 44. 36. Gormley 174. 37. Springer 1999, 215. 38. For a discussion of Lenny as a victimized white male, see Lane. 39. Butler 1993, 15. As Butler notes, the hegemonic force of the visual inscription of race was all too apparent in the Rodney King affair (1992), where, despite the video footage showing LAPD cops viciously beating and kicking a defenceless black male, they were acquitted precisely because “[t]he visual field . . ., itself a racial formation,” produced black masculinity as a site of brutal, primitive, meaningless violence (ibid. 17). 40. Balsamo 233. 41. The Lawnmower Man (dir. Brett Leonard, 1992) screens a dull-witted lawnmower man whose intellectual capacity is increased by 400 percent in virtualreality experiments. He eventually perceives himself to be the new Jesus Christ and manages to transcend the flesh when he succeeds in downloading his consciousness onto cyberspace, attaining omnipotence and immortality. 42. After Gloria Foster’s death, the oracle was played by Mary Alice in The Matrix Revolutions. 43. For a discussion of Hollywood’s current trend for representing AfricanAmericans as magical helpers, who devote their lives to helping white people, see Gabbard. 44. Feng 155. 45. Butler 1990, 6. 46. Wolmark 8. 47. Willis 2. 48. Rutksy 187. 49. Telotte 16. 50. Dyer 212. Dyer’s work forms part of so-called “whiteness scholarship,” which gained a foothold in the U.S. academy in the 1990s. While it tends to refer to the work carried out by white theorists, it is important to note that the impetus to explore whiteness emanated from theorists of color, as diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and bell hooks, and their discussions of the damaging effects of people “becoming” or believing themselves to be “white.” The most useful branches of whiteness scholarship aim at revealing whiteness to be a historically contingent, socially constructed, ontologically empty, fundamentally unstable category, caught up in a dialectical tension with its polar other—blackness—upon which it depends for self-definition. Most theorists categorically state the need to make whiteness visible in order to rob it of its normative status. By drawing attention to the fact that whiteness is an identity formed in opposition to what it is not, whiteness studies links whiteness to racial privilege and imperialist practices rather than skin color. However, whiteness scholarship has been accused of claiming victim status for whites in its


51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

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assertion that whiteness is an empty and undesirable identity, as well as reinscribing blackness as a more authentic identity. It has also been viewed by some theorists of color as white academics muscling in on race, particularly in the light of its rapid institutionalization in the academy. For a useful overview of whiteness scholarship and its attendant problems, see Wiegman 2003. Gabbard 186. Springer 1996, 59; Lupton 487. Fernbach 248. For Julia Kristeva, the abject is “what disturbs identity, system, order” and threatens the subject’s bodily and psychic boundaries. The maternal body thus represents ultimate abjection for the male subject because he always fears “his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother” (Kristeva 4, 64). Freeland 208. Freeland compares The Matrix unfavorably with eXistenZ (dir. David Cronenberg, 1999), a film that, she claims, “revels in the goo of flesh, gore, and blood” and suggests that “bodies can be both delightful and disgusting” (ibid. 205–206). Ibid. 206, 209. Braidotti 2002, 251. Plant 1995, 59. Plant 2000, 335. Springer 1996, 104. Braidotti 1994, 60. Fuery 71. Balsamo 229.

Bibliography Balsamo, Anne. “Forms of Technological Embodiment: Reading the Body in Contemporary Culture.” In Featherstone and Burrows, Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/ Cyberpunk : Cultures of Technological Embodiment, 215–237. London: Sage, 1995. Bell, David, and Barbara M. Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures Reader. London: Routledge, 2000. Bignell, Johnathan. Postmodern Media Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Bordo, Susan. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture. Albany: The State University of New York Press, 1987. Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity/Blackwell, 2002. ———. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Butler, Judith. “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia.” In Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert GoodingWilliams, 15–22. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cavallaro, Dani. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture. London: Athlone, 2000. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993.

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Descartes, René. Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings. London: Penguin, 2003. DiPiero, Thomas. “White Men Aren’t.” Camera Obscura 30 (1992): 113–137. Doane, Mary Ann. “Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine.” In Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, edited by Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth, 163–191. New York: Routledge, 1990. Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997. Featherstone, Mike, and Roger Burrows, eds. Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment. London: Sage, 1995. Feng, Peter X. “False and Double Consciousness: Race, Virtual Reality and the Assimilation of Hong Kong Action Cinema in The Matrix.” In Aliens R Us: The Other in Science Fiction, edited by Ziauddin Sardar and Sean Cubitt, 149–163. London: Pluto, 2002. Fernbach, Amanda. “The Fetishization of Masculinity in Science Fiction: The Cyborg and the Console Cowboy.” Science Fiction Studies 27. 2 (2000): 234–255. Foster, Thomas. “Postmodern Virtualities.” In Featherstone and Burrows, Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk, 79–95. ———. “Trapped by the Body? Telepresence and Transgendered Performance in Feminist and Lesbian Rewritings of Cyberpunk Fiction.” In Bell and Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader, 439–459. Fradley, Martin. “Maximus Melodramaticus: Masculinity, Masochism and White Male Paranoia in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema.” In Action and Adventure Cinema, edited by Yvonne Tasker, 235–251. London: Routledge, 2004. Freeland, Cynthia. “Penetrating Keanu: New Holes, but the Same Old Shit.” In The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real, edited by William Irwin, 205–215. Chicago: Open Court, 2002. Fuery, Patrick. New Developments in Film Theory. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Fuller, Graham. “Big Bad Bigelow,” Interview, November 1995. Gabbard, Krin. Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984. Gormley, Paul. The New-Brutality Film: Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2005. Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review 15. 2 (1985): 65–107. Holland, Samantha. “Descartes Goes to Hollywood: Mind, Body and Gender in Contemporary Cyborg Cinema.” In Featherstone and Burrows, Cyberspace/ Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk, 156–174. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lane, Christina. “The Strange Days of Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron.” In The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor, edited by Deborah Jermyn and Sean Redmond, 178–197. London: Wallflower Press, 2003. Lupton, Deborah. “The Embodied Computer/User.” In Bell and Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader, 476–488. Nakamura, Lisa. “Race in/for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Net.” In Bell and Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader, 712–720. Plant, Sadie. “Beyond the Screens: Film, Cyberpunk and Cyberfeminism.” Variant 14 (1993): 12–17.


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———. “The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics.” In Featherstone and Burrows, Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk, 45–63. ———. “On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations.” In Bell and Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader, 325–336. Plato. Phaedo: The Dialogues of Plato. Translated by Francis Cornford. New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1957. Rehling, Nicola. “Everyman and No Man: White, Heterosexual Masculinity in Contemporary Serial Killer Movies.” Jump Cut 49 (2007), http://www.ejumpcut. org/currentissue/Rehling/index.html. Rheingold, Harold. “A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community.” In High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace, edited by Peter Ludlow, 413–436. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1996. Robinson, Sally. Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Rutksy, R. L. “Being Keanu.” In The End of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties, edited by Jon Lewis, 185–194. London: Pluto, 2002. Sardar, Ziauddin. “alt.civilisations.faq: Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West.” In Bell and Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader, 732–752. Savran, David. Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Sobchack, Vivien. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. ———. “Beating the Meat/Surviving the Text, or How to Get Out of this Century Alive.” In Featherstone and Burrows, Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk, 205–241. Spelman, Elizabeth V. “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views.” Feminist Studies 8. 1 (1982): 109–131. Springer, Claudia. Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in a Post-Industrial Age. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. ———. “Psycho-Cybernetics in Films of the 1990s.” In Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Annette Kuhn, 203–218. London: Verso, 1999. Stern, Karl. The Flight from Woman. New York: Noonday, 1965. Stone, Allucquère Rosanne. “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures.” In Bell and Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader, 504–528. Telotte, J. P. “The Tremulous Public Body: Robots, Change, and the Science Fiction Film.” Journal of Popular Film and TV 19 (1991): 14–23. Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. ———. “ ‘My Name Is Forrest Gump’: Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity.” In Multiculturalism, PostColoniality and Transnational Media, edited by Ella Shoat and Robert Stam, 227–255. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Willis, Sharon. High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Wolmark, Jenny. Introduction to Cybersexualities: A Reader On Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, edited by Jenny Wolmark, 1–9. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Žižek, Slavoj. “Cyberspace, or the Unbearable Closure of Being.” In Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories, edited by Janet Bergstrom, 96–125. Berkley: University of California Press, 1999.

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Filmography Alien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Twentieth Century Fox, 1979. American Psycho. Dir. Mary Harron. Lions Gate Films, 2000. Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Columbia Pictures, 1992. Copycat. Dir. Jon Amiel. Warner Bros., 1995. eXistenZ. Dir. David Cronenberg. Miramax Films, 1999. Falling Down. Dir. Joel Schumacher. Warner Bros., 1993. Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Twentieth Century Fox, 1999. First Blood. Dir. Ted Kotcheff. Orion Pictures, 1982. The Lawnmower Man. Dir. Brett Leonard. New Line Cinema, 1992. The Matrix. Dir. Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski. Warner Bros., 1999. The Matrix Reloaded. Dir. Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski. Warner Bros., 2003. The Matrix Revolutions. Dir. Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski. Warner Bros., 2003. Strange Days. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow. Twentieth Century Fox, 1995. The Terminator. Dir. James Cameron. Orion Pictures, 1984. Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Dir. James Cameron. Tristar Pictures, 1991. The Thirteenth Floor. Dir. Josef Rusnak. Columbia Pictures, 1999. Tron. Dir. Steven Lisbeger. Buena Vista Pictures, 1982. Virtuosity. Dir. Brett Leonard. Paramount Pictures, 1995.

11

F l e sh E nc ou n t e r s Bio t e c h nol o g y : Spec u l at ions on t h e Fu t u r e of t h e Biol ogic a l M ac h i n e Domna Pastourmatzi

In place of the religious awe of prior cultures toward the body, we commonly speak of our heart as a “ticker,” our brain as a “computer,” our thoughts as “feedback,” and our digestive and sexual organs as “plumbing.” —Andrew Kimbrell (1997), The Human Body Shop Beyond the material control of life, there is now a quest for controlling information—the DNA sequence, the “word”—frequently perceived as life’s logos. —Lily E. Kay (2000), Who Wrote the Book of Life? No more gods, no more faith, no more timid holding back. The future belongs to posthumanity. —Max More, www.mactonnies.com/trans.html

T

he latest advances in the biomedical and information sciences have generated novel collective fantasies, daily disseminated through the mass media and reflected in works of popular culture and mass entertainment. To the old icons of the human being as animal, as machine, as a system of elementary particles (atoms) and chemical functions, new images have been added: the human being as cyborg, as electronic personality, as factory of recyclable organs, as farm of biological materials, as incubator, as biocollectible,1 as plastinated, skinless artifact,2 and many others. Attached to this new imagery is a genomic mythology that presents the human genome “as an information system, a linguistic text written in DNA code”;3 hence the terms code of codes, book of life, mother of all encyclopedias, and living library, cater to the myth that flesh-is-really-text to be read and edited. Though once perceived as mysterious and sacred, the human body is no longer a revered terra incognita. Scientific scrutiny has rendered the body a demystified, transparent, comprehensible, mappable, and quantifiable thing.

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D om n a Pa s t ou r m at z i

Thanks to new forms of medical imaging, including the Visible Human Project,4 the body at the beginning of the third millennium is “utterly available as visible matter.”5 Purported to address the problem of bodily opacity, the Visible Human Project “indicates the latent status of all citizens, all subjects, as possible objects within the optical field of biomedicine. All subjects are potential standing reserves and sources of biovalue, raw materials for biotechnical projects.”6 The formation of the postmodern social order requires harnessing the forces of human embodiment. In addition, the recently acquired data about its constitution and function along with the discovery of technologies that allow us to manipulate it in radical ways have contributed to the “mathematization of the human body.”7 Since the early 1990s, there is an “ongoing digitalization of the body. Every aspect of the human is being converted into computer information, whether it is blood gas compositions, heart rates, brain waves, or the genetic code itself.”8 Furthermore, scientific rhetoric has given us “different ways of talking of the body (for example, as a computer, an information-processing network, or a multiple input-multiple output transducer)” while the advent of computers and other technologies have led to “dramatically new ways of experiencing and interacting with that body.”9 Having embraced the postwar “switch to information thinking,”10 contemporary technoscience views the flesh-and-blood human entity as a decipherable composite of various encoded systems, housed in an assembly of biological limbs and organs. By the same logic, the brain has been defined as a complex network whose coded bits of data are transferable into computers and communication systems. This new conceptualization of the human brain as a processor of information and in turn of information as the “essence” of life has facilitated the cognitive shift from embodied presence to disembodied data. When a universal informational code is taken to be the substance of everything that exists, when information is said to flow unchanged between carbon-based organic and silicon-based electronic components, then it is easy to equate biological organisms and machines. The new cultural mindset literally textualizes both mind and consciousness, taking at the same time the body as encoded matter. It is significant to note that the literary use of the language of informational theory (often employed by postmodern writers to describe the body) has its roots in the discovery of the double helix by James Watson and Francis Crick in the 1950s. However, “the notion of genetical information that Watson and Crick invoked was not literal but metaphoric.”11 Later, the new molecular biology influenced by cybernetics and communication sciences transformed analogy into ontology and life into mathematical algorithms. In fact, the Human Genome Projects in the UK, United States, and Japan were based on the literalization of the genome as information system or linguistic text written in DNA code, since they were perceived as missions of “reading” and “editing” it.12 Science fiction is actively engaged in current technoscientific and political controversies and offers a penetrating glance into what it means to be embodied beings or posthuman creatures. Science fiction often delves into

F l e s h E nc ou n t e r s Bio t e c h nol o g y

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the dangers inherent in the hierarchical relationships between body and technology, matter and form, presence and pattern. Moreover, it “frequently envisages a new, revised body as a direct outcome of the advance of science.”13 This study examines the representation of the human body and its relation to new technologies in two science fiction stories, “Lethe” (1997) by American Walter Jon Williams14 and “The Extra” (1990) by Australian Greg Egan.15 The objective is to demonstrate that science fiction narratives, often called intellectual experiments, are not ideologically neutral literary exercises; often the fictional scenarios advocate a specific scientific paradigm and embrace its radical intervention in human life. In contrast, other stories critically scrutinize the cultural fantasies of bodily manipulation with sober speculations about the limits of scientific techniques and the tractability of the flesh. The discourse of Williams is technocratic; it validates the postmodern conceptualization of the body-as-code, a body subdued, manipulated, controlled by biotechnology. In other words, “Lethe” celebrates the posthuman future of the biological machine, a future based on the assumption that entities and bodies are malleable things, easily fashioned according to a cultural ideal. In contrast, Egan’s narrative is permeated with irony and skepticism regarding the commodification of the body and its deliverance on the technological altar. Egan focuses primarily on the cloned body as a living factory of biological materials and as an object to be recycled; he probes into the consequences of handling the body as fodder for the cloning and transplantation technologies. Egan also flirts with the idea of biological immortality, but he is more skeptical than Williams about the prospect of successfully separating the core of human consciousness from the flesh. Foregrounding the complexities of material embodiment, the seamless unity of mind and brain, and the physicality of human consciousness, Egan questions any technological determinism that promotes the notion of a readable, recyclable, expendable body. Though he is not a foe of science, Egan distances himself from unrestrained technophilia; he dramatizes the results both of a technical bodily invasion and the resistance of a partially uncontrollable body. Prior to analyzing the futuristic conceptualization of embodiment in the two stories, I find it necessary to briefly recount Western scientific and philosophical ideas that have contributed to the mechanistic perspective of sentient life and have come to pervade Western culture long before they found illustration in works of science fiction. From Rene Descartes we inherited the model of bete-machine, from Gottfried Wilhelm von Liebniz the notion of living bodies as “machines ad infinitum,” from Julien Offray de La Mettrie the idea of human beings as “perpendicularly crawling machines.”16 In the twentieth century, new apostles joined the chorus, adding their voices to the deification of machines at the expense of creatures of flesh. The “father” of cybernetics Norbert Wiener insists on the interchangeability between organisms and machines, and he sees no distinction between animate and inanimate matter.17 Marvin Minsky views the human brain as a “meat machine.”18 Gregory S. Paul and Earl D. Cox assert beyond doubt

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that the human body is “an articulated robot.”19 Donna Haraway, in her cyborg manifesto, acknowledges that “The machine is us, our processes, and aspect of our embodiment.”20 Postwar scientific thought coupled the mechanization of body and mind with the upgrading of information as the “essence” of everything and thus continued on the path of reduction. Following in the steps of modern physics that reduced the complexity of the sensible world to an astonishing simplicity of three units (protons, neutrons, electrons), contemporary genetics reduced the complexity of organisms to a language-based genetic endowment. Indeed, we are told that there is a “genetic library” housed in “the nucleus of each of our cells,”21 containing thousands of volumes with instructions (and written in a language of four letters) of how to make every part of our bodies. From the late 1980s onward, due to technical developments both in cyberscience and biology, along with an emphasis on the functional circuitry of systems, information theory reigns supreme. A younger generation of molecular biologists has accepted the computer as “a suitable model for the cell”22 or for an organism, and has embraced the new paradigm that “recognizes no boundary at all between informational processing and molecular biology.”23 The new biogospel insists that the DNA of the double helix is a storehouse of information that expresses its data “as a sequence of molecules in much the same way that silicon chips process information as zeros and ones.”24 Apparently, the language of contemporary biology has been shaped by “the new biosemiotics of communication.”25 No wonder many scientists in “the flesh-eating 90s”26 set out to captivate us with the vision of “informational man.”27 Seductive as it may be, this highly reductionist vision relies on a deliberate cognitive equation of organism with text and of DNA with language; it obscures the genetic, cellular, organic, and environmental complexities of life; it renders biological language linear and unambiguous. But as Lily E. Kay reminds us, language is context-dependent and words are polysemic. In fact, “biological meaning is hard to extract from the molecular syntax.”28 Many aspects of human biology are not “deducible from the DNA sequence, or ‘word’ ” and genetic messages are not an “unambiguous instruction manual.”29 Actually, they read more “like poetry, in all their exquisite polysemy, ambiguity and biological nuances.”30 In the context of the current cultural moment, the “meat” (the human body) and its morphological characteristics are deprived of their function as markers of identity. Consequently, the subject of liberal humanism is engulfed by the postmodern cyborg without the loss of its subjectivity, since the essence of both is the asomatic (abstract) spirit or code. Katherine N. Hayles astutely observes that the trajectory of Western thought from the Platonic tradition to postmodern logocentrism is based on privileging the “abstract as the real,” and information as the “ultimate Platonic form.”31 The new paradigm of disembodied information is but “a new variation of an ancient game.”32 In this technologically conducive climate, it is not surprising that some science fiction writers salute the cyborgian embodiments forged by


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biotechnology, whereas others are not so keen on the prospect that scientists are “beginning to gain unprecedented control over the scheme of life itself, assuming the roles of creator and designer of the entire living kingdom from microbe to man.”33 Science fiction, “the quintessential genre of postmodernity,” offers “characteristic representations of futuristic ‘tomorroworlds’ ”34 and “provides an ideal form for the fictional exploration of [the] confluence of ideas and technological development.”35 Futuristic tales routinely incorporate current and prospective biotechniques into their plots; they articulate the West’s new cultural fantasies, carrying along the relevant ideological substratum that conditions people to accept imminent changes in daily life. By exposing us to radical manipulations of the human body, science fictional scenarios facilitate the necessary shift in perspective before our collective consciousness can accept the possibility of a transhuman or posthuman future. Donna Haraway puts it tersely, “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.”36 Moreover, Evelyn Fox Keller adds that “it is in scientific literature that most science fiction originates.”37 Undoubtedly, there is a strong link between the future imaginary and technoscience. However, we must bear in mind that the literary representation of the human body in Anglophone science fiction is not homogeneous but contingent to the specific historical and cultural framework influencing each writer’s stance.

“Lethe” The short story “Lethe” is an example of “bioart”; it incorporates the mechanistic worldview of the Western scientific tradition and it stands in full harmony with the working hypothesis of flesh-as-text. Walter Jon Williams celebrates the posthuman future of the biological machine; adhering to the leading trends, he deploys the idea of the molecule as message and delineates our biogenetic processes as readable scripts of information, easily ciphered by the inanimate silicon chip. In a matter-of-fact style, Williams registers the actual disembodiment and re-embodiment of the self as a necessary prerequisite of space colonization.38 Williams’s literary representation of the body erases the distinction between cells, genes, chips, and circuitry and recasts the old dualism of body/soul as matter/information. His narrative justifies the theory that equates human essence with pure information and preaches that the vessel is replaceable but the information is priceless. Futuristic scenarios like “Lethe” aim at making the reader comfortable with the notion that living flesh shares the mechanistic properties of cold matter as well as with the power of technoscience to literally dismantle and reconstruct the body atom by atom. Such tales function as champions of the postmodern cultural imaginary. Perceiving life “not in terms of metabolism but in terms of structural information,”39 Williams employs the information metaphor and applies the principle of mass production to the human body. Indicatively, his futuristic vision relies on teleportation40 aided by the experimental science of

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nanotechnology, a “type of molecular technology” that promises to deliver “the power of altering or creating structures by manipulating atoms and molecules.”41 In actual life, the only practical way of traveling in space and reaching distant planets is aboard a spaceship. An expansionist migration to extraterrestrial habitats requires the transportation of flesh-and-blood human beings. However, Williams debunks the standard paradigm of the body as a physiological unit of inseparable and indispensable parts and of people as indivisible corporeal entities. His model allows the dissolution and reconfiguration of human beings on extraterrestrial locations, thus drawing attention to a technologically mediated construction of the human body. The creation of posthumans in the story is a deliberate act of bioscience, ideologically sustained by the rationale that travel to other planets in gigantic spaceships is a very expensive, impractical, and hazardous enterprise. Instead of “shipping out millions of warm bodies from Earth, running the risks of traveling for decades in remote space,”42 Williams proposes the alternative solution of assembling adult human bodies on location and then animating them with digitized personalities that have been transmitted across great expanses of space. If we take into consideration the cold fact that “the other planets of our solar system” are not “available abodes for life, or at least for anything resembling Terran life,”43 then we can understand why the two new strategies suggested by science fiction writers in the 1990s have already undermined conventional thinking related to star travel. James Blish described them thus: “you can change the planet to accommodate the colonists [this is known as terraforming] or the colonists to accommodate the planet”;44 this second method has been labeled “pantropy.”45 Williams affirms both of these strategies, endorsing at the same time the postmodernist concept of living organism as coded text and of biology as “a kind of cryptography.”46 In fact, “Lethe” can be taken as the literary manifestation of what Evelyn Fox Keller has called “the vision of sending human beings over the wire.”47 In the text, nanomachines construct and then insufflate bodies not with the biblical breath of life but with an “electron kiss.”48 In other words, they fill “minds” with “downloaded personalities of volunteers from Earth.”49 Whereas the Bible represents the human body as malleable clay in the hands of an omnipotent God, Williams’s postmodern narrative depicts it as a dissoluble, transmittable, reproducible, and programmable matter at the disposal of an omnipotent nanotechnology. Exhaustively mapped to its tiniest particles, theoretically, the body is now a familiar territory ready to be invaded by computer-driven gadgetry. Nanos are microscopic, complex, practical devices with atomic precision, which supposedly would have the ability to enter cells, cruise through the bloodstream, detect structural and degenerative changes, repair genetic mutations, and rearrange atoms to create new molecular machines. “Lethe” registers an absolute faith in the efficacy and infallibility of this powerful future technology and vindicates Eric K. Dexler’s claim that the development of assemblers is inevitable.50 Before the triumphant somatic engineering, the body regresses to a


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mere vessel unnecessary in the formation or maintenance of human identity. The severance of the body from self and consciousness is a necessary step for those who envision a cyber-evolution. “Lethe” requires a conceptual quantum leap because it asks the reader to view the body as biological hardware, and memory and consciousness as collections of data. The first sentence of the narrative states that the protagonist “Davout had himself disassembled for the return journey.”51 To travel from the planet Shaperdon back to Earth, all Davout has to do is lie down on “a bed of nanos and let the little machines take him apart piece by piece, turn his body, his mind, and his unquenchable longing into long strips of numbers.”52 This miraculous transmutation of an embodied creature into a mathematical script takes place linguistically, but the narrative implies that it is actually the state-of-the-art microscopic robots that crawl into Davout’s “brain first, mapping, recording, and then shut down his mind piece by piece, so that he would feel no discomfort during what followed, or suffer a memory of his own body being taken apart.”53 In other words, although literary logos reduces bones, flesh, blood, organs, cells, genes, and neurons into an electronic text, the narrative voice tries to persuade the reader that it is infallible nanotechnology that completes the job. According to the theory of a readable human nature, the “readouts” of the human genome and the human brain can be managed by machines.54 In “Lethe,” the literary pen both empowers and licenses nanomachines to “play with molecules and atoms as if they were toy building blocks.”55 Technological determinism is essential to futuristic space projects that are based on the “appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture.”56 If people are not to “arrive” but are to be “transmitted” as digital information to remote planets, then they must trust the efficacy of communication technologies. Williams’s narrative takes the idea of the matter transmitter made popular by Star Trek a step further. It is an advanced method of teleportation that equates human personality with information. As Stableford and Edwards clarify, “scrupulous attempts to rationalize matter transmission . . . assume that what is actually transmitted is information regarding the exact duplication of the object to be reconstituted, not actual matter, so that much so-called matter transmission is really duplication.”57 “Lethe” fosters the mythology of the denatured body and asks us to welcome the technological usurpation of those functions that were once the sole prerogative of biological organisms. The body is no longer the inviolable, unified, and indisputable locus of human identity but a disposable container, readily reconstructed by the new architects of life. Like the DNA molecule, it “has become just another part of an informational network, now machine, now message, always ready for exchange, each for the other.”58 In turn, the artificial body is being naturalized. Although the dynamic processes linking genotype to phenotype are enormously complex, although “DNA does not produce bodily traits in a simple, linear way,”59 although the process of how the molecules become messages is still a conundrum, the conflation of biogenetic information and technical

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instruction allows the literary text to realize what the cultural critic Andreas Huyssen calls “the ultimate technological fantasy,” that is “creation without the mother.”60 It is thus understandable why Williams’s centenarian characters, although they maintain anthropomorphic physicality, remain childless, preferring to have cloned brothers and sisters, and gladly opt for an assemblyline mechanized rebirth. As a postmodern mythmaker, Williams disentangles consciousness from flesh and severs the self from the disposable body with the stroke of his pen, trying, like Donna Haraway, to convince us that “No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves”61 and that there is nothing appealing about a specifically constituted body. However, he explains neither how “essence” is defined and authenticated nor how the “I” is decoded and then encoded into a material referential. To refashion the body means to divest it from its function as the locus of identity and self, and in turn to interpret it as a plain cosmetic wrapping to a nonetheless gendered subjectivity. Williams takes pains to minimize the impact of the technological assault on the body and to allay fears of personality dissolution. He rationalizes the disassembly and reassembly process as a foolproof procedure that leaves the male essence intact. In other words, body reconstruction does not lead to any incalculable loss or damage but guarantees a resurrected self, with its subjectivity, consciousness, memories, life experiences, and sexual identity intact. The fictional character Davout agrees with his brother that while assembling “new bodies to live in,” the “pattern of thought,”62 which is actually the human psyche, does not change. Davout notices that his “bald and leathery” scalp has been covered by a “fine blond hair,” that “his vision is more acute, his hearing less so—and his muscle memory was somewhat askew. He remembered having a shorter reach, a slightly different center of gravity. But as for himself, his essence—no, he felt himself unchanged. He was still Davout.”63 Such logical maneuvering masks the body’s “utter technological contamination.”64 Williams’s constructionist position erases the biological fact that “the body is the net result of thousands of years of sedimented evolutionary history, and it is naïve to think that this history does not affect human behaviors at every level of thought and action.”65 To render the technical construction of the body harmless and to make the separation of the flesh from the subject’s consciousness even more alluring, the writer’s pen colludes with high-tech tools and invokes the liberal gospel of personal choice. Cosmetic surgery takes the interface of the skin-bound body with technology a step further. Remodeling the body to perfectly suit the environment or the owner’s preferences is shown to be a routine job. When Davout the Conqueror and his beloved Dark Katrin are on the terraforming mission on Sarpedon, they “re-create” themselves “with dark, leathery skin and slip pupils, as human forms suitable for Sarpedon’s environment”;66 when Davout returns to Earth, he again indulges in “a few cosmetic procedures” that allow him to “look a little more Earthlike.”67 The end result is to have Davout acquire again his “own, original form,” that is “Age twenty or so.”68 In fact, Davout can remember “several bodies


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back, once possessing that tall forehead, the fair hair, the small ears flattened close to the skull,”69 traits that once revealed a physical resemblance with his brothers. As a fleshy container, this old familiar body “was a useful body when [he] wore it,”70 but years later Davout chooses to reconfigure it. In “Lethe,” the powerful trinity of nanotechnology, cosmetic surgery, and cloning aided by bioinformatics sustains new cultural hypotheses: the human body is reducible to bionic components; these parts can be perfectly reproduced and easily molded according to the subject’s chosen image; the soul is nothing but “long strands of numbers”;71 emotions, memories, and experiences can be stored digitally, can be exchanged or expunged; the artificial manufacturing of new bodies guarantees physical immortality; the brain’s capacity can be technologically enhanced so as to acquire a wider field of knowledge; one’s bodily death is not irrevocable as long as clones of that person exist; one’s digital death is also not irrevocable provided that personal information has been updated to the latest moment; one’s entire psycho-emotional world and lifelong memories can be retrieved from the clones’ brains by downloads and enhanced by data in storage. Inspired by the prospect of cyber-immortality, Williams promotes a brave new way of thinking that champions an unfettered bioculture, with terraformed planets, designer bodies, and digital personalities. In this “world where no one died, and nothing was ever lost” claims Williams, Physical immortality was cheap and easy, and was supported by so many alternative systems: backing up the mind by downloading, or downloading into a virtual reality system or into a durable machine. Nanosystems duplicated the body or improved it, adapted it for different environments. Data slumbered in secure storage, awaiting the electron kiss that returned it to life.72

“Although full-fledged nanomachines are still some distance in the future,”73 and although “[w]e do not today have the ability to modify human nature in any significant way,”74 these are facts that do not impede the science fictional imagination from delivering the posthuman future and transforming the physical body beyond recognition. Ultimately, futuristic visions like “Lethe” try to convince us that technoscience can transcribe the world, the body, the mind, memories, emotions, and consciousness as code problems of massive data to be dealt with by technical means. What is not highlighted is the fact that the conceptualization and treatment of humans as biological machines inflict considerable violence upon the human body and the human entity. Under the veil of utopianism, the historically male goals of immortality and omnipotence pave the way to an imposed techno-euphoria.75 Though Williams concedes that even in an ultra high-tech culture space accidents may lead to the death of a person, he redefines death as the loss of the mass of data that is the person. It is neither the irreversible degeneration of the flesh nor the abrupt failure of bodily organs or functions that lead to extinction. On the contrary, it is the technical failure of automatic systems and the resulting inability to recover the relevant mass of data that lead to

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“rare” death. Having lost his beloved Katrin in an inexplicable space accident, Davout the Conqueror is stung by pain, grief, and despair. Williams depicts his character’s futile attempts to resurrect the personality named Dark Katrin via cloning only to teach him the lesson that you can duplicate the body but you cannot duplicate the mind. The “New Katrin” is the identical twin of the Dark Katrin but her “patterns of thought”76 are different; thus no amount of learning, training, and memory input can resurrect the lost personality. Williams does seem to foreground the uniqueness of the human psyche, that is, the asomatic (abstract) spirit or code that he takes to be the essence of personality. Through the angry reaction of the female clone Fair Katrin, Williams delivers an objection to a “modular theory of the psyche.”77 In her words: “The human mind is more than just ingredients to be tossed together. The atomistic view of the psyche is simplistic, dangerous, and wrong. You cannot will a psyche to be whole, no matter how many wholeness modules are uploaded. A psyche is more than the sum of its parts.”78 These statements aim at criticizing a technologically imposed happiness called “Lethe,” rather than registering an aversion against the manipulation of the body. The concern centers on the fragmentation of the soul; the cloned female repudiates the loss of the wholeness of a unique and autonomous psyche but says nothing about the uniqueness of embodiment and the role of a specific body in the formation of that psyche. In the story, people lose their humanity because they choose vicarious happiness and uploaded passions instead of enduring painful memories and integrating new experiences. They do not lose their humanity because they have reconfigured their bodies and restructured or cloned their flesh. “Being me” means “I am the sum of everything that happened to me” (192) claims the female clone, but Williams does not link personality to a non-duplicable or biologically distinct body that through time also contributes to the formation of personality; he rather links personality and the self to “patterns of thought”79 but never clarifies how they are inscribed or encoded in the flesh. Thus when Davout is finally forced to mourn his lost Katrin, he mourns her irrecoverable personality and bodiless psyche, privileging the “abstract as the real” and tipping the polarity body/ soul in favor of the soul. For Williams, the mind’s patterns (alias human essence) are impossible to duplicate technologically once the data is lost, whereas the inconsequential flesh-and-blood body poses no actual problems to technical manipulation, being irrelevant to human consciousness.

“The Extra” Whereas Williams presents the body as a biotechnological construct, Greg Egan in his story “The Extra” questions the notion of the body as prosthesis and stresses the physicality of human consciousness. Pondering over the question whether the transplantation of an original brain into a new manufactured body can be a noninjurious affair, Egan concludes that any attempt to treat the human brain as the locus of consciousness and “the seat


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of reason”—as “vegetable matter”80 —will lead to a disastrous outcome. To sever the brain from its original body and expect a foolproof transference to a new container means to ignore the biological fact that consciousness is grounded in inextricable cellular matter. Egan is skeptical of the notion that the organic is nothing more than raw material for experimentation, replication, and recycling. The hypothesis that cloning and transplantation technologies will deliver a prolonged lifespan induces a cognitive and behavioral shift, which encourages the separation of lifestyle from life expectancy and promotes an abusive treatment of the body. Comforted by the knowledge that “[t]wenty-first century medicine had gradually weakened many of the casual links between lifestyle and life expectancy—and the advent of Extras would, for the very rich, soon sever them completely,”81—Gray, the forty-four-year-old degenerate billionaire, basks in the thought of the cloned body as a living factory of vital organs; that is why he keeps a “stock of congenially brain-damaged clones” at hand, with “each batch a decade younger than the preceding one.”82 The subhuman clones are to be used “in the short term, as organ donors; in the long term (once the techniques were perfected) as the recipients of brain transplants,” with Gray being the “ultimate beneficiary.”83 Valuable only for its prospective use, the cloned body automatically loses its worth once the necessary organs have been harnessed. In turn, the rejuvenated body is also devalued by being subjected to every conceivable abuse. Gray’s philosophy of the disposable cloned body is laden with ideological baggage and old prejudices. If the donor body is to fulfill its function, it must be prevented from becoming a psychic pollutant and a threat to spiritual health. While Gray ensures that his clones remain in an “athletic clean-living” environment and precludes “widespread masturbation and homosexual behavior” to prevent any undesirable “physiological sideeffects,” he ravages his own body by indulging in a “gluttonous, sedentary, drug-hazed, promiscuous life” and wrestles with the ensuing “irrational self-disgust.”84 Although concerned about the animalistic sexual appetite of human nature, Gray is fascinated when gazing at “this primitive aspect of himself unleashed, without the least risk to his own equilibrium.”85 Hostage to the traditional dualistic rationale of a dirty/clean, sick/healthy, and contaminated/purified body, Gray seeks “blameless flesh.” He wants to begin life anew “with a sense of purification, a sense of rebirth” (59). Only if the clones are kept “innocent” and their bodies “without sin” can technology deliver rebirth and absolution. Gray even entertains the thought of attending “his own cremation and watch his ‘sinful’ corpse consigned to ‘hellfire’! as a way to ‘neutralize’ this irrational self-disgust.”86 Biotechnology’s power to supply him with new organs strengthens Gray’s theory that the body, just like a comfortable garment, should be discarded once it wears out. Repetitive transplantation surgery has already given him “two livers, one kidney, one lung, and quantities of coronary artery and mucous membrane.”87 The prospect of ultimately being transferred into a new, sinless, healthier, younger body gives Gray license to continue an

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unrestrained, self-indulgent lifestyle characterized by an immense appetite for sexual novelty and pleasure. Affluence conspiring with amorality leads Gray to embrace the convenient illusion that the body is an ephemeral but easily replaceable vessel and that cremation is the practical method to erase the traces of a degenerate lifestyle. Nonetheless, for Egan the acquisition of a cloned body does not guarantee spiritual catharsis, because bodily abuse leaves indelible marks on consciousness, which no surgical procedure can eradicate. Egan pushes the fantasy of recycled flesh to the extreme when he has his hero conceive the following outrageous idea: to “swap” bodies with one of his younger clones and instead of consigning his middle-aged “discarded corpse” to flames, to keep “his old body alive with the Extra’s brain” and have it “walk the grounds of his estate.”88 Brain transplantation is already an eccentricity brewing in the West. Donna Haraway claims that “We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body. But with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either.”89 She favors technological pollution and argues that “[a] cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden.” 90 In contrast, looking at the practical circumstances that render the organic body guilty or innocent, Egan reminds us that it is this very body that holds us accountable for our sexual abuses and antisocial conduct. A twist in the plot allows Egan to demonstrate how a crafted body can be used as the perfect alibi to absolve moral failure. In the imaginary culture, the subhuman cloned body holds a commodity status and is legally unaccountable for the effects of its use; it is the owner and not the bearer who is held responsible. But Gray thinks that he can evade legal and moral responsibility for loaning one of his cloned bodies to his ex-lover Sarah. Why should he, who “had a vasectomy years ago, and could produce records proving his infertility,” 91 bear the blame for the conception of unwanted offspring, since it is the outcome of sexual intercourse between an unwilling twenty-four-year-old clone and a willing woman? Egan asks us to consider which body should be incriminated for its sexual function and which body should be acquitted of any sexual charges: the body-commodity with its laboratory markers or the body-client free of labels? The logic that frustrates both accountability and fatherhood in the technopolis is this: Although the Extra’s brain damage resulted solely from fetal microsurgery, rather than genetic alteration, all Extras were genetically tagged with a coded serial number, written into portions of DNA which had no active function, at over a thousand different sites. What’s more, these tags were always on both chromosomes of each pair, so any child fathered by an Extra would necessarily inherit all of them. Gray’s biotechnology advisers assured him that stripping these tags from the zygote was, in practice, virtually impossible.92

In a culture of technologically engineered, irresponsible bodies, the practice of branding the DNA of clones with indelible genetic markers automatically


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reifies them and justifies their commodification. If all mass-produced products carry a coded serial number, why not the cloned body? The technologically polluted body in the case of Egan’s story is not Haraway’s subversive cyborg; it is a body-product or a body-copy without volition, destined to be manufactured serially and thus blameless for its abusive use; though innocent by definition, it is condemned to extermination on the pyre so as the sins of the authentic corporeal agent can be absolved. Not only does Egan seem to agree with Jean Baudrillard that “. . . precisely sex is not a function, it is what makes a body a body,”93 but he questions the presumption that redemption is a simple technological matter grounded on the idea that personal accountability can be displaced to the sexed clone, a fabricated commodity whose social status is the same as chattel. If any child fathered by an Extra would necessarily inherit the genetically tagged-with-a-coded-serial-number chromosomes, what would be the social status of this product of miscegenation (between chattel and a free woman)? While exploiting current technofantasies to infuse his story with an innovative plot, Egan makes clear that the physical body and the organic brain are not exchangeable containers irrelevant to human consciousness and identity. Aware of the fundamental biological fact that “memories are stored and recalled in synapses,” that “consciousness depends on exquisite coordination and timing over large areas of the brain and among immense numbers of neurons,” 94 Egan foregrounds the complex interdependence of body and brain; information contained in brain cells cannot be easily extricated from its material basis. Since the subjective process of consciousness is inscribed in living matter, which is constantly impacted by an endless accumulation of new experiences and the interaction with an environment in flux, it is an illusion to assume that human essence can be extracted at will just like we extricate information from a computer chip. Egan puts it succinctly: Brain and body grow and change together throughout life, becoming increasingly reliant on each other’s idiosyncrasies, in a feedback process riddled with chaotic attractors—hence the unavoidable differences, even between clones. In the body of a human (or an Extra), there are thousands of sophisticated control systems which may include the brain, but are certainly not contained within it, involving everything from the spinal cord and the peripheral nervous system to hormonal feedback loops, the immune system, and, ultimately, almost every organ in the body. Over time, all these elements adapt in some degree to the particular demands placed upon them—and the brain grows to rely upon the specific characteristics that these external systems acquire.95

Contrary to Williams who tries to lure the reader to the fantasies of a cyberevolutionary path to immortality and accepts the interchangeability between informational pattern and material instantiation, Egan contends that “swapping” bodies, memories, and identities under the assumption that human consciousness can be salvaged intact, after biologically invasive procedures switch it off and on, is an illusion. The hope of survival (through the use of multiple cloned continuers) and the assumption that copy and the original

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are one and the same backfire. Whereas vanity and the ambition of being the “first” to reap “all the glory of being a path-breaker” 96 fuels the biotechnological experiments in Egan’s narrative, a self-serving faith in technoscience permeates the text of Williams. Egan foregrounds the biological character of the corporeal being; flesh is not an irrelevant vessel. On the other hand, Williams embraces the “informational man.” Only freak cosmic accidents can annul the power of technological determinism in Williams’s utopian cyber-universe, where the loss of cyber-immortality is an event more traumatic than physical death. In addition, Egan does not seem to share Haraway’s view that “to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse with the other. Yet to be other is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial.” 97 Only metaphorically and not biologically can embodied beings erase the boundary between the original and the copy and embrace a multiple self. Egan foregrounds the price of a schizophrenic consciousness inherent in the attempt to replace the original aged body with the cloned replacement. After a seemingly successful brain transfer, Gray wakes up trapped in a numb body, “unable to move or make a sound,” feeling “utterly helpless and humiliated.” 98 The only functioning sense is his eyesight. “The prospect of spending months merely to regain the use of his very own body” 99 plunges him into rage and depression. Through physiotherapy, he regains his motor control and sense of touch, but neurologically he remains a cripple. Gray soon realizes that he would never master speech and that “the necessary modes of thought were simply no longer available to him.”100 He eventually comprehends that there are two Daniel Grays now: he, “a composite of Gray and the Extra D12” reduced to chattel, and a “more complete Daniel Gray” who has everything, speech, money, property, power, ten thousand servants, and of course, perfect health. Trying to come to terms with his new condition, Gray speculates that this schizophrenia must be the result “of remnants of his brain in this body retain[ing] enough memory and personality to make him believe that he, too, was Daniel Gray.”101 The nightmarish ending of the story can be interpreted as Egan’s message that the materiality of the flesh (the meat) is unique and relevant. Egan offers us a valuable observation. Namely, that no biotechnological procedure, however sophisticated, is exact and risk-free; that human consciousness is “the most physical of things”; it cannot be “cut up like a starfish” and still be kept intact; that “the processes that constituted human self-awareness [may be] redundantly duplicated in the most primitive parts of the brain,”102 but this redundancy is not trivial. In short, human biological complexity cannot (for the time being) be mastered at the operating table or the laboratory. To interpret human consciousness as a mere property of the brain is grossly misleading. Fragmented bodies and brains mean fragmented human consciousness. I venture to say that Egan will most likely agree with Jean Baudrillard that a functional and mechanistic point of view, which sees each organ as “only a partial and differentiated prosthesis,” each cell of a body as “an embryonic” prosthesis, and “the DNA molecule as “the


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prosthesis par excellence,”103 inevitably leads both to the devaluation of the body and to its reduction to an abstract formula; it deprives the body from its “aura, its singular quality of the here and now, its aesthetic form . . .104 The production of metamen (posthumans) is not just a technical matter but one with socio-political consequences. The cultural logic of late capitalism implies that “the ultimate consumption is to cyborg yourself.”105

Science Fiction and Social Impact Technoscience and “hard” science fiction have been mutually affecting each other and strengthening the bond between them for several decades. They employ the same discursive tools and draw inspiration from the storehouse of the western imaginary, to which both contribute with fervor. Bionic bodies or techno-bodies are prolific in science fiction; on the other hand, scientists in the new millennium are working hard to actually implement the fantasy of flesh as data on the practical level. While imaginary scenarios derive their value from their function as thought experiments and can legitimately represent the body as a discursive construction or a fashion accessory rather than the ground of being, applied biotechnology aspiring to literally transform the material body into a compliant string of bits minus consciousness can hope to do so only when it validates its functionalist, reductionist, and mechanistic perspective in practice and not in principle. Although science fiction writers realize what Donna Haraway has pointed out, namely that “Communication technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies,”106 not all of them deliver enthusiastically the human body on the altar of technoscience. The symbiotic relationship between art and science in the case of science fiction does not necessarily lead to the consensus of a post-biological future as utopian or vindicate the cultural fantasy that the posthuman is a desirable universal human condition. Literary narratives, like “Lethe,” collude with the abstract theories equating the flesh with text in order to conceptualize the body as a computational object; the fantasy they spin draws its power from omnipotent words that construct, alter, edit, erase, reconfigure, and manipulate an already textualized body. Fictional reconceptualizations and manipulations of the body are valid only on a metaphorical and symbolic realm; they cater to the human desire to indulge in fantastic mind games and achieve the unattainable cognitively. The textualized flesh is abstract clay in the hands of writers and it is this very abstraction of the actual organic body in the creative but controlled lab-environment of fiction that permits the bloodless transition of human consciousness into a technologically contaminated posthuman existence. We know that in the actual world, Logos is not enough to render technoscience an efficient and infallible tool as some of the most ambitious futuristic visions assert. Human bodies are not machines and molecules are not just messages; nor is the human entity a set of programs to be manipulated at will. Life is extremely complicated and not yet fully understood, despite the claim that finally the secrets of nature are yielding gracefully to rational

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inquiry. Imagination can afford to welcome bodily fragmentation;107 biological existence cannot. Whether our bodies should or should not be seen as sacred is a matter of ideology and politics. Currently, the biological machine, the informational man, the digital personality, the cloned creature are all viable only in the pages of futuristic stories. Only in fiction are the magical transmutations from flesh to text and text to flesh ubiquitous and painless. The new fantasies of a posthuman biology have colonized the imagination of not only writers and readers but also of many influential scientists, who are working hard to render the technoscience of science fiction an instrument that would prescribe real life in the future. This convergence of artistic imagination and biotech practice tends to inflame the appetite of an already insatiable bioculture. Literature may exact from us a mental contestation of our taboos and prejudices, but when the literary word gives license to the tools of technoscience to shape the evolutionary path of humanity, it partakes of the responsibility for the outcome. Whether we should or should not perceive our morphological characteristics as contributors to our identity, embodiment as vital and not incidental, flesh as superfluous, consciousness as a computational process, and the brain as prosthesis to the mind, remains a matter of personal philosophy. The new iconography of the body is not innocuous when it deprives the human consciousness from its biological grounding. To defend flesh and embodiment does not necessarily mean to uncritically embrace biological essentialism. As Egan illustrates in his tale, the human body, though not immune to the contagions of technology, is not acquiescent clay in the hands of cutting-edge technology but a resistant agent with idiosyncratic properties. The battle raging between body and technology is fought not only on the literary arena but on the operating table as well. At the beginning of the third millennium, the fantasy of heading toward a posthuman future is presented by some scientists and writers as common sense. But how many of us are eager, ready, and willing to pay the price for the cultural, cognitive, and aesthetic depreciation of the flesh? A posthuman future would extort from us a price whose magnitude we cannot yet conceive. It remains to be proven whether the unique bodies of our biological hypostasis are nothing more than archives of programmable data or malleable systems of recyclable flesh.

Notes 1. In Body Bazaar, the authors denote “the use of human remnants as ideological souvenirs,” the latest trend in “dead tech” and retail bone boutiques, as well as the appeal of body parts and human DNA as biocollectibles (Andrews and Nelkin 132; see also pages 131–135). 2. Gunther von Hagens, a physician and anatomy lecturer at the University of Heidelberg, invented a method called plastination, which he used to prepare 200 body parts and life-size figures for his exhibit called “The Human Body World” at the State Museum of Technology and Labor in Mannheim Germany in 1998 (Andrews and Nelkin 126). Plastination is “a preservation technique that replaces


3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

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the water in cells with a polymer, rendering the corpse odorless, dry, and realistic looking” (Cohen 2002). Kay xv. In The Visible Human Project, Waldby reports that after twelve years on death row, convict Joseph Paul Jernigan, of Waco, Texas, was executed by injection in August 1993. In 1994, the U.S. National Library of Medicine in Bethesda dissected, photographed, and converted his corpse into three-dimensional visual data files. Jernigan became the first Visible Human with a virtual body. In 1995, the donated body of an unnamed fifty-nine-year-old woman, who died of a heart attack, was subjected to the same three-dimensional visual reconstruction. She became the first Visible Woman. These two virtual corpses constitute the Visible Human Project. For more details see 1–18. Waldby 5. Ibid. 157. Gray 2001, 70. Ibid. 70. Keller xvii. Kay xv. Keller 19. Kember 16. Doane 110. Walter Jon Williams has won the Nebula award (given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) twice. Greg Egan is considered one of the most important science fiction writers of the nineties, and an expert in biotechnological issues. The Cartesian philosophy claimed that many bodily functions and physical processes can be understood as mechanistic activity. John Locke accepted the assumption that both body and mind obey mechanistic principles. Claiming Descartes as his direct ancestor, the French scientist de La Mettrie, author of L’ Homme Machine (1748), tried to show that “man’s psychical processes, no less than his physical processes, could be explained in terms of a mechanistic and materialistic hypothesis.” For further details see Copleston’s A History of Philosophy (1963), volume four. Keller 115. Cited in Kimbrell 283. Paul and Cox 345. Haraway 180. Sagan 276, 273. Keller 113. Ibid. 114. Saunders 14. Kay xviii. Arthur Kroker’s phrase cited in Hayles 5. Kay 1. Ibid. xviii. Ibid. xviii. Ibid. xix. Hayles 13. Ibid. 13. Kimbrell vii.

216 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

D om n a Pa s t ou r m at z i Janes 92. Ibid. 93. Haraway 149. Keller 115. According to Keller, the idea of beaming people from one place to another, although introduced to popular culture by the first generation television series Star Trek, “it had already been proposed explicitly by Norbert Wiener as early as 1964.” The collaboration between scientists and science fiction writers is an established fact. Nowhere is this collaboration most visible than in the quarters of space agencies. Long before the general public and the political establishments believed in the dream, science fiction writers and NASA engineers were the first to approach space travel as a possibility. “Certainly, a high proportion of NASA scientists, technicians, and administrators were long-term readers of science fiction” (Shippey xxiv). Some have had careers both as scientists and writers. A recent BBC News report announces that it is not only NASA that consults science fiction authors and uses them “in focus groups for the pre-planning of missions,” but also the European Space Agency, which is “studying science fiction for ideas and technologies that could be used in future missions.” In fact, even as we speak, “a panel of readers is currently combining sci-fi novels and short stories published in the early decades of the last century to see if technology has caught up with ideas that were futuristic when first put into print” (Ward 2000). In the twentieth century many renowned scientists had tried to persuade us that we are stardust and as such our destiny is in the stars. The fantasy of colonizing other planets has been drilled into the minds of billions. A recent article titled “Build the Space Ark of Noah” states that according to the estimates of experts we must colonize at least two planets by 2050 because Earth is running out of inhabitable space and natural recourses. The well-known astrophysicist, Steven Hawkins, does not think that “the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space” (www.mactonnies.com/trans.html). The first manned mission to Mars is to be launched in ten to fifteen years and is said to be a collaboration project between ESA, NASA, and the Russian space program (Lainas 2002, 82, 80). Harris 61. Fox Keller notes that the April 15, 1993 issue of Nature reported that quantum physics had adopted the science fictional idea of teleportation. Miksanek 55. Williams 175. Dozois ix. Cited in Dozois x. Dozois 2002, x. Stableford explains that the idea of specially engineered individuals or “adapted human beings” for the colonization of other worlds can be found in science fiction since the 1950s, especially in the works of James Blish, Philip K. Dick, and Poul Anderson. In fact, James Blish in his pantropy series of the 1950s “treated the idea of man-remade-by Man seriously and sympathetically” (Clute and Nicholls 1994, 123). Furthermore, “NASA’s commitment to the human-machine space-travel system was inevitable since much of its technoscience, especially in biomedicine, came out of the U.S. military, committed to what they call the man-machine weapon system since World war II” (Gray et al. 1995, 9). Haraway 164.

F l e s h E nc ou n t e r s Bio t e c h nol o g y 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

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Keller 115. Williams 170. Ibid. 175. Miksanek 57. Williams 166. Ibid. Ibid. It is well-known that no computer up to now possesses the unrivalled power of the genome or the complexity of the human brain. “One gram of the molecules could hold as much data as a trillion CDs” (Saunders 14). Another fundamental problem is estimating brain speed; no one knows how fast a human brain works. Miksanek 64. Haraway 150. Stableford and Edwards 1994, 788. Keller 118. Nelkin and Lindee 4. Huyssen qtd. in Janes 92. Haraway 163. Williams 179. Ibid. Waldby 20. Hayles 284. Williams 174. Ibid. 177. Ibid. 177. Ibid. 173. Ibid. 177. Ibid. 172. Ibid. 170–171. Bova 180. Fukuyama 82. In Immortality, Bova prophesizes that “physical immortality is within sight” (xiii), that “today’s research will lead ultimately, inevitably—to human immortality.” He also admits that “the search for the Fountain of Youth has been predominantly a male search” (Bova 19, 20). Williams 199. Ibid. 188. Ibid. 189. Williams 199. Egan 63. Ibid. 59–60. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 56, 57. Ibid. 57, 59, 60. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 59, 60. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 62. Haraway 157. Ibid. 190.

218 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

D om n a Pa s t ou r m at z i Egan 60. Ibid. 60–61. Baudrillard 98. Paul and Cox 167. Egan 62–63. Ibid. 66. Haraway 177. Egan 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73, 72. Ibid. 73, 72. Baudrillard 98. Baudrillard 99. Gray 2001, 40. Haraway 164. The questions about what happens to gender identity when the body is fractured into functional parts and molecular codes, and where gender identity is located in the reconstructed body, are beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice to say that both stories are male-centered discourses; their male characters inhabit a white, heterosexual body, which seems to retain its inscribed gender and sexuality even after multiple reconstructions.

Bibliography Andrews, Lori, and Dorothy Nelkin. Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age. New York: Crown, 2001. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulation and Simulacra. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. Bova, Ben. Immortality: How Science Is Extending Your Life Span—And Changing the World. New York: Avon, 1998. Cohen, Hal. “Bioscience Moves into Galleries as Bioart.” The Scientist 16 (November 11, 2002): 57. Copleston, Frederick, S. J. A History of Philosophy: Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Leibniz. Vol. 4. Garden City: Image, 1963. Doane, Mary Ann. “Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine.” In The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, edited by Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kathryn Woodward, and Fiona Hovenden, 110–121. London and New York: Routledge/ The Open University, 2000. Dozois, Gardner. Preface. Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future. ix–xiii. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002. Egan, Greg. “The Extra.” In Clones, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, 55–73. New York: Ace, 1998. Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Gray, Chris Hables. Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age. New York: Routledge, 2001. Gray, Chris Hables, Steven Mentor, and Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera. “Cyborgology: Constructing the Knowledge of Cybernetic Organisms.” In The Cyborg Handbook, edited by Chris Hables Gray, 1–14. New York and London: Routledge, 1995.


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Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991. Harris, Steven B. “The Immortality Myth and Technology.” In Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by George Slusser, Gary Westhfahl, and Eric S. Rabkin, 45–67. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1996. Hayles, Katherine N. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Janes, Linda. “Introduction to Part Two.” In The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, edited by Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kathryn Woodward, and Fiona Hovenden, 91–100. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Kay, Lily E. Who Wrote the Book of Life?: A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Keller, Evelyn Fox. Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Kember, Sarah. Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Kimbrell, Andrew. The Human Body Shop: The Cloning, Engineering and the Marketing of Life. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1997. Lainas, Thodoris. “Build the Space Ark of Noah” (Ftiaxte ti Diastimiki Kivoto tou Noe). Vimagazino 93 (July 21, 2002): 80–83. Miksanek, Tony. “Microscopic Doctors and Molecular Black Bags: Science Fiction’s Prescription for Nanotechnology and Medicine.” Literature and Medicine 20. 1 (Spring 2001): 55–70. Nelkin, Dorothy, and M. Susan Lindee. The DNA Mystique. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1995. Paul, Gregory S., and Earl D. Cox. Beyond Humanity: CyberEvolutions and Future Minds. Rockland, MA: Charles River Media, 1996. Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. New York: Random House, 1980. Saunders, Fenella. “Gene-ius Computer.” Discover (April 2000): 14. Shippey, Tom. Introduction. The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories. ix–xxvi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Stableford, Brian. “Biology.” In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, 122–124. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994. Stableford, Brian, and Malcolm J. Edwards. “Matter Transmission.” In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, 787–788. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994. Waldby, Catherine. The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine. London: Routledge, 2000. Ward, Mark. “Science Fiction Powers Space Research.” BBC News, May 11, 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/744019.stm. (accessed November 7, 2007). Williams, Jon Walter. “Lethe.” In Nebula Awards: Showcase 2000, edited by Gregory Benford, 165–201. San Diego: Harcourt, 2000.


12

Mode r n i t y a n d t h e O T H E R Body : Th e Hu m a n C on t r ac t w i t h Mu t e A n i m a l i t y Linda Williams

T

his essay explores the ways in which deep genealogies in Western thought continue to inform contemporary concepts of postmodernity and the posthuman. While such genealogies seem to me to have a longue durée that exceeds the limits of modernity, for the purposes of this essay I would like to draw attention to the way medieval ontological dualism continues to shape our understanding of the nonhuman world. Moreover, since from the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries theological dualism was facilitated by scientific instrumentalism, early modern enquiry provided techniques that remain identifiable in contemporary figurations of posthuman flesh. Categories such as the posthuman, or for that matter the postmodern, it seems to me at least, are neither past human or humanism, or past modernity.

Posthuman Hubris The notion of the posthuman is based on the belief in the power of human technology to transform the natural limits of our bodies, thus creating a human teleology of the flesh that transcends the earthly boundaries prescribed by natural evolution. The contemporary cyborg as a central figuration of the posthuman is created by techno-science, which, like a modern-day Prometheus,1 has refashioned the stuff of life to challenge both the old deities of creation and the contemporary model of biological evolution. Yet, insofar as the claim for a posthuman condition pertains to a life lived beyond the apparent limitations of human flesh, it does not differ substantially from the ancient belief in an afterlife. That is to say, traditional notions of life after the human, the “post-human” as it were, pertained to a condition in which the soul transcends the delimitations of the flesh: either in a state of transcendent rapture or in the idea of a perpetually renewable torment or suffering that any natural body would be unable to sustain. In

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short, life after the human condition ended in either heaven or hell. In this sense, speculation on the fate of existential embodiment in a posthuman, or cyborg, regime retains a great deal of traditionally idealist aversion to the materiality we share with animals. Contemporary idealism is a human, and to some degree humanist, projection in which the technological fantasy of trans-human empowerment requires a silencing of actual material contingencies. In this scenario, mortal human flesh is consigned to the status of dumb animality, and our indisputable ontological interdependence with the nonhuman world is effectively erased by the requirements of a silent contract in which all things nonhuman become subject to human will. Until recently, for over a millennium, most Western minds had inclined to the theological view that mortality pertains purely to the flesh. Animals were butchered or died in ways that were seen as uncomplicated due to the prevailing theological assurance that since animals do not have souls their ending comes with their physical deaths. Conversely, traditional theology proclaimed that human death pertains only to this “animal” dimension of human beings (or what in cyber-speak is now referred to as the “meat world”), that is, the mortal flesh we share with other animals.2 Thus, according to the church fathers such as Aquinas and the late-medieval scholasticism that was sustained well into the early modern period, it is only human consciousness that is privileged to continue into the afterlife.3 The distinction between man and the animals in Western theology was a serious matter since no smaller question than immortality itself depended upon it. Furthermore, it is the theological claim to human immortality, I would suggest, that continues to drive the distinctions between human and animal from which the construction of the cyborg is derived. The first human images were of animals, and configurations of the animal have always been our closest physical, social, and cultural points of connection with the nonhuman world. Nonetheless, the mastery and control of nature required our separation from it, and the processes of the objectification of nature were crucial to our ability to control the thing we most feared, which was the death that came with being a part of the material world. In early modernity, the scientific objectification of the animal body was a critical development in defining this separation of man from the nonhuman world. Yet, despite the emergence of secular rationalization that arose with scientific objectivism, the fundamental ontological dualism of scholastic theology still persisted into the modern era. Nonetheless, the objectification of the animal in early modernity also produced nineteenth-century Darwinism, in which the exclusivity of the human claim to superiority started to look less robust when measured against evidence of immensely powerful prehistoric predators, or the proximity of other forms of sentient evolution such as primates or marine mammals. It was not then just objectification in itself that appeared to ratify the unique category of a potentially divine humanity, but rather objectification combined with a rational instrumentalist model of science and technology. As with Prometheus’ challenge to the preordained nature of things, for modern

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man technology was inseparable from the will to power and the domination of nature. Despite a brief period of scientific enthusiasm for Cartesian beast machines in early modernity, in which the animal was reduced to a merely mechanistic model,4 what once appeared as the unequivocal differences between humans and animals were gradually undermined by scientific objectification to the extent that we must now acknowledge that the great gulf between the human and animal, especially other mammals and primates in particular, has been traversed by the recognition of our evolutionary and genetic connections with other sentient species. Yet, unless we were to adopt an unreflective Darwinist model of the unassailable superiority of human predation, the radical implications of such knowledge have not altered essentially the social status of animals. On the contrary, it could be argued that the ontological model informing the social status of nonhuman mammals in contemporary contexts, such as abattoirs or experimental laboratories, for example, more closely resembles medieval scholastic theology than a putative condition of postmodernity. Claims such as those made by Jean-François Lyotard, for example,5 in which the grand meta-narratives of history are now sublated by postmodern incredulity, do not seem to extend to the old story of the purpose of animals. In the grand narratives of Western history, beasts were created for the service of man, and there is little in the contemporary factory farm, ubiquitous fast-food outlet, or the steady annihilation of nonhuman species that would suggest our incredulity toward stories that ratify man’s place at the apex of an ontological order that appears to exist merely to serve human progress. In short, the medieval meta-narrative about the “purpose” of animals, though augmented since the seventeenth century by objective enquiry, is identifiably alive and well, just as the old theological narratives of mastery over nature have persisted into liberal-humanist models of subjectivity in late modernity. Thus, while Darwinism was a form of scientific objectification that included human beings as a part of nature, the epistemology of instrumentalist models of technological progress was driving the dominance of liberal humanism in which man, as the measure, and measurer, of all things was, at best, only required to acknowledge his responsibility for stewardship of the natural world, which he alone was able to transcend. However, the image of the animal as the mute accomplice of the human self-image, as the master of nature, is one that from the emergence of modernity has also been subject to immanent critique. It is important to remember that a number of versions of what it means to be a human subject have emerged from early modernity, and even from the Enlightenment project itself. They are often drawn together under the approximate rubric of modern liberal humanism, yet this actually conceals more than it reveals. Alternative models of the human and nonhuman worlds emerged (as early as the sixteenth century) in the work of Montaigne, the early modern humanist who had a shrewd grasp of how the human response to animals actually tells us a great deal more about human hubris than anything else. Montaigne chose to listen carefully to the varied voices of animals, and hence to contemplate the

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eloquence of alterity. Other dissenting discourses on the nonhuman world can also be found in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century feminism and aspects of Romanticism,6 genealogies of thought that continue to play a role in late modernity and the “future of flesh.” Deep ecology, eco-feminism, and other contemporary critiques, for example, grew out of the legacy of Enlightenment, and they survive as potential points of subversion within the indisputably dominant paradigm of technological instrumentalism and control. Despite such innate critique, it must also be acknowledged that many of the voices raised in early modernity against the unilateral mastery of nature have now been subsumed or silenced by a world in which flesh itself is seen increasingly as industrialized commodity.7 Moreover, at the level of human affects at least, experience of nonhuman alterity is now commonly prescribed by social figurations such as pet-keeping or the spectacle of nature witnessed in zoos or mass media. Though these are certainly complex figurational processes that may to some extent destabilize the dominant paradigms of mastery and control, they also share origins derived from the deep genealogy of the idea of human superiority. I want to suggest that it is precisely the persistence of this very deep human affect of mastery and our consistent adherence to the modern narrative of exponential progress that make current claims for the postmodern, and posthuman, untenable. What, then, are some of the dominant claims made for the development of a posthuman condition? The most immediate seem to lie with the configuration of the posthuman cyborg as a postmodern configuration. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, for example, see posthuman bodies as at once the cause and effect of postmodern social relations, a kind of self-fulfilling circular argument in which the postmodern and the posthuman can be swapped about according to whatever relativist position requires explanation. It is unsurprising then that they dismiss history as an “inefficient” method for understanding more precisely what those relations could be.8 This is a fatal flaw in their position, which blinkers them to the possibility that we might actually exist within an intensely accelerated late-capitalist phase of modernity rather than their assumption that the condition of postmodernity is an uncontested fact. As I have suggested, just as Lyotard’s claim that the meta-narratives of modernity have been eroded by postmodern incredulity does not obtain to our concept of the ontological status of animals, it could also be said that this putative incredulity has not undermined belief in the modern model of progress. This model, after all, continues to drive technological production and lies at the very core of the exponential development of capitalism. In short, I am claiming that postmodernity is not past modernity, any more than posthumanism can be said to be separate from the discourses of modernity, or to some extent even premodernity. If for a moment we put aside the obfuscation of the connection of the posthuman with the postmodern and suspend the possibilities suggested by the seductive projections and reflections of science fiction, the cyborg may be more simply and clearly defined as the prosthetic enhancement of the human


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body. Yet, while there can be little doubt that such technological interventions offer significant medical advantages, most discussions of the cyborg are less focused on these than on the possibilities of extreme bodily longevity, or the fundamentally infantile dream of omnipotence. The essentially infantile fantasy of omnipotence, or regressive posthumanism, is evinced by Hans Moravec’s dream of downloading the mind onto computer memory, a kind of cybernetic rapture resurrecting the mind from the despised mortality of the flesh. Yet, most accounts are less ambitious and focus on the possibilities of an unstable prosthetic subjectivity that seems caught in a liminal or limbo-like condition that is both human and yet also nonhuman. Such figurations of the cyborg could, however, be regarded as semi-regressive because the general categorization of the nonhuman is really only limited by the scope of human invention, rather than an acknowledgement of the permeable boundaries between human mind and flesh. Moreover, with the inimitable progress of technological research, the unstable boundary between abject flesh and the human will to transcend mortality seems poised for a rapid mutation in an evolutionary shift toward intensified prosthesis, and putatively toward a regressive construction of the posthuman. Indeed, if we are to accept Joel Garreau’s popularist account of the progressive technological curve, in twenty years the developments in genetics and pharmacology will have enabled many of the wealthy elite to become what Garreau calls nuhumans. And again, far from evincing a condition of post, or past modernity, such a cyborg vanguard will represent a capitalist elite reminiscent of Weber’s notion of a neo-Calvinist elect, enhanced beings visible to all by the good works they have performed on their bodies. It is not necessary to adopt a technophobic view of such regressive constructions in order to position the cyborg as a thinly disguised metaphor of anxiety about death. Like the contemporary fashion for plastic surgery, the figuration of the cyborg allows the individualist subject the possibility of relief from the agony of deterioration from the social ideal of fetishized youth, and promotes the technological fantasy of escaping an ineluctable return to formlessness, and to the soil. More progressive views of the cyborg, such as those espoused by Donna Haraway, acknowledge the instability of the borders between the self and the other, and that the nonhuman world has always been constitutive of human subjectivity. Many commentators, however, are limited by a reluctance to look beyond current definitions of the postmodern or post human. Mark Dery, for example, sees the cyborg simply as the interface of technology and the body. Yet, technology has a long and complex history, and by this account, it is unclear to me where a genealogy of the cyborg would actually begin. Does it emerge, for example, with the invention of prostheses such as the eyeglasses or crude artificial limbs of early modernity? Or is it more accurately defined by the Paleolithic adaptation of animal skins, or the evolutionary leap with four legs that came later with the mastery of the horse? When Katherine Hayles, in her historically comprehensive and critically astute assessment of cybernetics and informatics, declared “We have always

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been posthuman,” she was drawing our attention to the enduring fiction of the autonomy of human subjectivity as against the vast networks of embodied reality that are “materially real, socially regulated, and discursively constructed.” 9 We are the products of a long and complex interaction with the nonhuman world and social habitus, and, as process sociology has shown us, to deny the centrality of the material nonhuman world in the longue durée of human history is to deny a crucial dimension of who we are.10 Because we owe as much to our shaping by the nonhuman world as we do to the social construction of the subject, the technological dream of unnaturally enhanced longevity (if not immortality) seems curiously redundant in the face of the ecological crises in the sphere of our origin and sustenance. Moreover, the steady extermination of other species could be seen as the fulfillment of that dimension of humanism in which the cosmos revolves around the central figure of man. The secularist acknowledgement of the loneliness of that position slowly becomes our reality. In such a humanist regime, the only possibility of alterity lies in the artificial voices we have made to speak back to us: our machines. Thus, the animal as a figure of genuine alterity, a voice from the nonhuman world, is silenced by the voices of human invention. Unlike other animals with rudimentary technology, we have the capacity to design intelligent machines, but it has yet to be shown how nature can be anything other than a sufficient condition of our being. The autocratic will to power that at once denies and, yet, seeks to supplant the great generative womb of nature is analogous to what eco-feminist Mary Mellor has called “parasitical transcendence.”11 This means that to proclaim the human condition as something beyond nature is actually to adopt the position of blind parasitism while simultaneously sustaining the long history of metaphysical binary oppositions such as those between the artificial and nature. Like the binary oppositions between mind and body, or reason and emotion, the primary term of instrumental rationality is privileged over the second order of bodily sensation in the service of traditional hierarchies, which segue almost seamlessly into an alliance with some of the more militaristic applications of the cyborg. Yet, as Mark Dery has pointed out, there are alternatives to the model of the cyborg as the hero warrior of mastery and control, such as those suggested by Donna Haraway. Dery sees that Haraway’s figuration of the cyborg has the potential to subvert the privileged manipulation of binary oppositions.12 And he has not mistaken Haraway’s rejection of new-age nature goddess feminism, for example, as a naïve opposition to the unstoppable tide of new technology. On the other hand, while he sees the importance of Haraway’s rejection of technophobia, Dery seems to have overlooked the significance of her respect for the women of Greenham Common—who, while not exactly a coven of earth goddesses, could hardly be seen as high-tech either.13 Like most others who refer to Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, much of the sense of rage in Haraway’s irony against cyborg militarism seems to be marginalized by anything that can be gleaned from the manifesto that looks like a celebration of technology. Haraway herself has commented on


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the critical reception of her work that made her reconsider irony as the most effective means of critique since many readers effectively missed the point: I have had people, like Wired Magazine readers, interviewing and writing about the Cyborg Manifesto from what I see as a very blissed-out, technosublime position14

At the beginning of the Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway outlined “three crucial boundary breakdowns” that underpin her political analysis: the boundary between human and animal, the boundary between animal-human (organism) and machine, and a third that is a subset of the second—the boundary between the physical and the nonphysical.15 And it seems to me that the elision of the first category in most responses to Haraway represents a weakness in the critical reception of her work, which is cognate with more widespread limitations in the discourse on the posthuman. Haraway went on to publish The Companion Species Manifesto in 2003, which has not taken off in quite the same way as the first manifesto, yet, in its quirky and quietly progressive way, provides important clues to deal with some of the problems of Big Science that arise with the cyborg. These problems can be seen at a number of turns in claims for a posthuman condition, particularly the military support for most cyborg-research projects, such as those funded by DARPA or the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. However, for the purposes of this essay I want to return to the question not so much of the posthuman but of the nonhuman and its deep genealogical connections with what it means to be human. While existing social relations between human and nonhuman experiences of corporeality might tell us about the contingency of the self, they may also point the way to the future of organic flesh. Our “meat,” like animal meat, may be seen increasingly as an expendable commodity. There is, for example, little to suggest a paradigm shift away from the human notion of man as the ruler of nature in flesh-farming or trade. Globally the same economic principles are at play whether the field is delocalized meat production, the market for human organs, or transgenic animal research. Animal flesh, whether it is used for food or as a readily available tool for biotechnological research, is conventionally regarded as a perpetually renewable resource, a raw material entirely subject to human control and production. While this conventional view of animal flesh as an instrument of human empowerment was not an invention of humanism, early modern humanism was the point from which the convention was consolidated within the context of scientific enquiry. And it is the early modern consolidation of the animal as an instrument of human knowledge that formed the basis of the contemporary social pact in which we have conceded to an effective erasure of animal sentience in order to facilitate their systematic commodification and violation. Since some animals have been selected as companion species, this erasure is partial and selective in ways that have the potential to disrupt the apparently seamless human contract of exploiting mute

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animality. Nonetheless, the instrumentalist paradigm remains dominant and owes a very significant part of its legacy to the transformation from sacred enquiry to a new scientific professionalism in the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries. For this reason, this period is one worthy of further scrutiny as a means to understanding the central problem of contemporary technology and attitudes to enfleshment. I would now like to turn, therefore, to a closer consideration of instrumentalism in early modern science as one of the more significant origins of an approach to the body, which has a genealogy leading to contemporary models of the posthuman.

The Acceleration of Instrumentalism in Early Modernity With the professionalization of sacred enquiry that emerged in the early modern period, the process of ontological distinction drawn between the human and animal body produced new forms of knowledge that reconfigured the social relations between humans and animals that had previously been determined largely by theological interests. One of the clearest examples of the instrumentalist use of the animal in this period is found in human anatomy, a literally incisive technique of analysis that made a significant contribution to seventeenth-century scientific knowledge and to Cartesian epistemology. Anatomy was a humanist endeavor; yet the animal body proved a crucial component in the process of determining what it meant to be human. And what human and animal bodies share had to be understood thoroughly before secular and rationalist arguments for the unassailable superiority and dominance of the human over the animal could supersede the older theological grounds for what was essentially the same model. The instrumentalist approach to the animal body in early anatomy, then, was founded on ontological foundations that, though at first appeared to be enduringly solid, were in fact from the very outset based on contradictions that had the potential to destabilize the humanist endeavor. One of the more salient contradictions lay in the fact that early human anatomy was also a form of comparative anatomy. That is, on one hand, animals were sufficiently nonhuman to be seen fit to become the living instruments of human enquiry; on the other hand, the bodies of primates, dogs, or pigs were considered close enough to the human to reveal the sublimely intelligent design of the human body, and one made in God’s own image. The rationalist objectification of nature from the late sixteenth- and through the seventeenth centuries was based on techniques of enquiry that were entirely consistent with the differentiation between humans as individual rational subjects and a still largely undifferentiated mass of brute animality. As individualism increased, so animal bodies became increasingly objectified as part of a concept of nature as inert, passive, and essentially mute. Instrumentalism essentially reconfigured the animal at this time as a prosthetic object for the study of man.


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When Foucault began Discipline and Punish with his excruciating account of public torture and execution in the ancien régime, he sought to dramatize the epistemic shift toward the institutional rationalization of bodily discipline. Reading against a Foucauldian notion of paradigm shifts and toward the direction of the longue durée, the following discussion of the scientific role of the animal in early modernity is intended as an example of the longevity of the instrumentalist paradigm. While instrumentalist regimes of technology may be as old as human history itself, there is no doubt that they have also been subject to condensed points of escalation. One of these escalations occurred in the seventeenth century, and another is occurring now. While the instrumentalist approach to animal flesh in early modernity serves as a metaphor for the idealist approach to the materiality of all flesh, it is also a crucial stage of development in the genealogy of instrumentalist techniques in general. In the early modern period the field of anatomy was the most dominant sphere in which instrumentalist approaches to the body developed. Two of the most important comparative anatomists of early modernity were Andreas Vesalius and William Harvey. I would now like to turn to a closer scrutiny of their approach to the animal body and initiate a discussion in which some of the similarities with the cyborg endeavor will become apparent, along with some of the innate contradictions within both projects.

The Early Modern Animal as an Instrument of Mastery Following the revival of Aristotelianism and the more attentive study of nature that arose with high Medieval scholasticism, the anatomical section of human bodies emerged with Mundinius in the fourteenth century and was at that time a means of validating Galen’s writings, which for more than a millennium had been the respected canon drawn from classical antiquity.16 Galen’s authoritative works were read by the physician from an elevated chair while a barber surgeon performed the task of rudimentary anatomical dissection. Vesalius changed this medieval practice with his own dissection bodies, and the flesh became a text, a book of nature, which he was able to decipher better than any other of his age. Prior to the publication of Vesalius’ On the Fabric of the Human Body in 1543, the iconography of human anatomies attest to a general reluctance on the part of the physician himself to touch or manually investigate the corpse as the object of study, and in representations of dissection only the lowly barber-surgeons actually touch the body. Vesalius, however, had no such qualms. He was a physician and he touched the body authoritatively. Vesalius wanted to distinguish himself from Galen insofar as Galen’s deductions about the human body were derived largely from the dissection and vivisection of animals, particularly primates and dogs. Nonetheless, as both Andrew Cunningham and Roger French have maintained,17 although Vesalius clearly claimed a new kind of status as a professional Renaissance

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anatomist and physician, he nevertheless worked within the tradition of Aristotelian natural philosophy and applied the empirical techniques of the ancients, and of Galen in particular. The late-medieval, Galenic, and humoral model of the body was one that offered a way of interpreting a person’s temperament and character. The phlegmatic, choleric, sanguine, or melancholic were all characteristics of a self shaped by the four material natural elements, and hence the signs of material corporeality were analogous in some ways to subjectivity and agency. Yet, when Vesalius opened the body and looked inside, it is unclear whether he would have seen signs of the individual “interiority” of another person, or merely the marvelous design of a vehicle for a departed soul. At this time, the vision of an actual interior life that lay behind appearances, or movement inside the fabric of the body, could only be studied in animals. Since one of the aims of Vesalius’ Fabrica was to demonstrate a knowledge of the normative human body, it would surely have reinforced the awareness of corporeal anonymity, or the recognition that (with the exception of some distinctions pertaining to concepts of gender) we are all made in more or less the same way—a notion that would eventually dispel humoral models for the interpretation of temperament. This is not to suggest that Vesalian anatomy was simply the beginning of an open secularization of knowledge. On the contrary, Cunningham’s speculative suggestion that Vesalius’ project was essentially Lutheran is convincing, at least in the sense that the Flemish Vesalius (who would certainly have been familiar with the concepts of radical Reformation) referred to the body as a book read against the authority of Galen in a similar way to Luther’s use of the authenticity of the Bible against the authority of Rome.18 And the fact that anatomy became a Lutheran endeavor—not so much in the medical schools, but in the philosophy courses of the Protestant universities of Wittenburg, Glasgow, and Edinburgh—at least confirms the view that Protestant culture, like the Catholic culture in which Vesalius first gained his reputation, viewed anatomical dissection as a legitimate approach to the body.19 Protestantism sought to replace the priestly mediation and sacramental rites of Catholicism with a new form of subjective autonomy and responsibility in relation to God, and since human anatomy was a way of knowing God through his design in man, and the body as God’s own image, then Vesalius’ approach to the body was consistent with the Protestant approach to divinity. For Vesalius, the finely illustrated Fabrica printed in Basle, which contained two portraits of himself demonstrating his mastery of his professional role, was an astute and timely means of making a significant public impact, surpassing his reputation for skillful public dissection and justly consolidating his reputation as one of Europe’s leading physicians. In the portrait of Vesalius in the Fabrica20 showing the dissection of muscles and tendons of the forearm, Vesalius looks out at us with an expression of confident authority. In his left hand he grasps the forearm (which like the rest of the corpse is depicted in an overly large scale), his right hand gathers the stripped tendons, and in the most literal sense he has within


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his grasp the structure and function of the body that motivate the physical mechanisms of his own gesture. This portrait of the physician in his elegant tunic shows a man who has attained a manual and intellectual mastery of his field. He has challenged the authority of the Galenic canon, and insofar as the image is an abstraction of social relations, it is above all an icon of control, and without doubt an early instance of an instrumentalist approach to nature. There is no memento mori or image of vanitas here (as there is in the title page); yet, we are surely confronted with a sense of disquiet underlying Vesalius’ firm, confident gesture to the extent at least that he reveals the material mortality of a faceless, normative body, and thus, by definition, one like his own. In this sense, anatomy is a process of scrutinizing the self, and while it may well be that as a man of the mid-sixteenth century Vesalius would have been in awe at the handiwork of God in man, there is no way of eliding the fact that in this portrait, and in the publication of the Fabrica itself, there is an assertion of professional pride taken in Vesalius’ own handiwork of deft revelation. In the tumultuous economic and social struggles that took place across Europe during the years of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, there were serious political consequences to any interpretation of man’s relationship with God. And for the anatomists who followed Vesalius—whether it was Servetus in Calvin’s Geneva (the “city of glass” where he was put to death), or Michelangelo’s physician Columbus in Counter-Reformation Rome—anatomy remained in the service of theology for as long as it remained effective as a means of revealing God in the body of man. As a new kind of professional inquirer, Vesalius had eschewed the services of the barber-surgeons who in the title page of the 1543 edition of the Fabrica 21 appeared to be involved in an argument below the table over who should sharpen the tools for the new master of anatomy. In this famous image, a dog (Vesalius’ own preferred animal for vivisection) appears to be barking, and it is notable that the monkey too has its mouth opened wide, in what we can only assume was intended to be an unintelligible screech. In fact, despite the animated gestures of many of the men (and with the exception of the corpse, they are all men), the animals appear to be the only figures with their mouths opened to make a sound (though the lowly barbers look like their closest contenders). It is also noteworthy that the objects of anatomical study: the female corpse and the two animals, form a compositional triangle within the title page, subtly reinscribing the links between the bodies of women and animals, both generally held to be less rational than men, and thus beings of lesser worth. Vesalius included a last chapter in the Fabrica, “On the dissection of living animals,” in which he enumerated various experiments, including some of Galen’s, such as the termination of the voice by severing the laryngeal nerves, thus silencing howling dogs or screaming monkeys, along with cutting the spinal cord in order to demonstrate that the brain controls the limbs through the spinal nerves. Animals such as those seen in the title page of the Fabrica, or the illustrations of animals prepared for vivisection, were typical

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of those used in countless experiments conducted following the publication of the Fabrica, and, as Roger French has observed, by the seventeenth century “Vivisection for teaching, discovery and the resolution of controversies was routine in European universities.”22 Since it seems very likely from the title page and biographical portrait in the Fabrica that Vesalius was fully aware of the theatrical potential of the anatomy lesson to dramatize his mastery of the new science, it would be consistent with his approach to conclude that this was carried through into his inventive demonstrations of bodily function in animal vivisection as spectacle. Indeed, in an eyewitness report of 1540, one Baldasar Heseler tells how Vesalius invited his students to feel with their own hands inside the opened chest of the dog he had been vivisecting to touch the heart while it was still beating.23 Vesalius had also pointed the way forward to a more mechanistic approach to vivisection by his invention of what appears to be an early form of artificial respiration. It was experiments of this type that allowed Vesalius to claim that the pulmonary artery was filled with blood and not air, as Galen had believed. While it was clear that vivisecting the animal heart could show how the human heart worked, the animal heart had no sacramental status, and, therefore, could be entered without hesitation. Equally, although the restraints Vesalius recommended as tools to perform vivisection make it obvious that animals would desperately seek to escape the procedure, to a man of Vesalius’ time the voices of animals had little capacity for eloquence. Vesalius’ straightforward directions for such experiments indicate an affect economy that has not been influenced by the questions raised about animal consciousness that begin to surface in the writings of his contemporary Montaigne, and which were later to be the subject of considerable debate in the seventeenth century. During the sixteenth century, there appears to be no recorded opposition to the idea that vivisection was a perfectly legitimate way to use the animal body, and by the seventeenth century, vivisection, like human dissection, was regarded as a routine spectacle of public theater 24 that was certainly recognized by the church as uncontroversial.

The Rationalization of the Heart and the Legacy of Instrumentalism By the mid-seventeenth century, marked ineluctably by the year 1649 when the head of King Charles I had been cleaved from his body, the study of human and animal anatomy through dissection, and of animals by vivisection, was widely held as an uncontroversial practice conducted by interested gentlemen across Western Europe, not only in scientific inquiry but also as a technique of demonstration and verification of existing medical knowledge of the body—and often as public theater. If the study of the animal body was important to medical science, I also want to suggest that it was a significant catalyst in the general development of rationalism. Since as scientific evidence accrued to the point where the physiological similarities between animal and human bodies became obvious, new philosophical and religious


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arguments had to be found to explore the implications that the new models of corporeality may have held for human subjectivity and agency. Comparative anatomy became the medium through which the unassailable differences between man and animals could be analyzed. A case in point was Descartes’ dualist model of animals as sensory machines, as distinct from his essentially Platonist concept of the human soul in the dense matter of the body (which as William Harvey had shown was sustained in animals and man by the central pump-mechanism of the heart). Conversely, the contrasts perceived in the seventeenth century between reason and corporeality could provide the means for an argument that promoted the regulation and control of a fundamentally bestial and carnal humanity in a body politic ruled by the “head” in the figure of the king. Hence, in the case of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, the common experience of existence was seen as an aggressively selfish pursuit with human lives limited by their connections with animals and thus described in Hobbes’ notorious phrase as “nasty, brutish, and short.”25 The secular differentiation between humans and animals ratified the supremacy of human reason and its capacity for faith in God and the monarchy. Above all, the cogito could be conveyed through language as a vehicle for rational discourse. Apparently bereft of meaningful language, and, therefore, of the capacity for self-reflection, the seventeenthcentury scientific animal existed as a mute confirmation of the human body as the only flesh animated by meaningful life. The seventeenth-century animal body, then, was a site from which techniques of modern rationality such as technological intervention in the body and its general objectification developed simultaneously with abstracted subjectification and individualism, which by this time was commonly augmented by the keeping of special animals as pets. I would now like to turn to a more detailed account of William Harvey’s experimental anatomy to demonstrate how techniques of instrumentalism developed in the context of seventeenth-century rational individualism. Despite the fact that Harvey, like many of his early modern urban contemporar ies, was a pet keeper, the question of animal sentience did not seem to trouble him during his many vivisections of animals, without which his famous essay on the circulation of the blood Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals in all likelihood would not have been written. Published in 1628, this revolutionary thesis started with a dedication to King Charles I. In this, Harvey drew an elegant analogy between the beating heart of the living animal and the person of the king (whom we now know was later to suffer the consequences of a political, but no less rationalist, revolution), Harvey wrote: The heart of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything within them, the sun of their microcosm, that upon which all growth depends, from which all power proceeds. The king, in like manner, is the foundation of his kingdom, the sun of the world around him, the heart of the republic, the fountain whence all power, all grace doth flow.26

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Despite the unmistakably lofty, Aristotelian tone here, it may be salutary at this point to envisage Harvey in his everyday linen and frock-coat, frequently soaked in arterial blood, and indifferent to the screams that certainly accompanied his frequent operations. He begins his first chapter with the observation: When I first gave my mind to vivisections, as a means of discovering the motions and uses of the heart, and sought to discover these from actual inspection, and not from the writings of others, I found the task so truly arduous, so full of difficulties, that I was almost tempted to think, with Fracastorius, that the motion of the heart was only comprehended by God.27

However, this concern was not derived from any sense of reflection on the fate of the animals, but rather from the apparently insurmountable problem of keeping the animal alive for as long as possible while, without either electric light or microscopes, he was able to observe the motion of the heart. Harvey came up with some ingenious (if to the late modern mind, quite appalling) solutions to the problem and eventually succeeded in his discovery. Thus the animal was an invaluable instrument of his knowledge. Yet, as Harvey’s biographers tell us, the childless Harveys also had a pet, of which Harvey wrote: A parrot, a handsome bird and a famous talker, had long been a pet of my wife. It was so tame that it wandered freely about the house, called for its mistress when she was absent, greeted her cheerfully when it found her, answered her call, flew to her . . . When ordered to talk or sing it did as it was bidden even at night and in the dark. Playful and impudent it would frequently sit in my wife’s lap where it loved to have her scratch its head and stroke its back whilst a gentle movement of its wings and a soft murmur testified to the pleasure it experienced.28

This pet then seems to occupy an entirely separate space of gentle domesticity from the little theaters of sustained agony occurring in Harvey’s study. Predictably, Harvey dissected the pet when it died and was quite surprised to find that such a clever bird was in fact a female. It is clear that the affectionate sensibility evident in his response to the female domain of the house could exist simultaneously with the rational disinterest he sustained in the professional realm of science, and affection for a pet did not in any sense contradict Harveys’ consumption of animals as food, any more than it would today. Like Vesalius, Harvey, who had studied at Padua, sought to establish his own reputation as a truly modern man of science who had demonstrated many of the limitations of the Galenic medieval tradition, and like Vesalius, Harvey’s professional fame was based substantially on an empirical observation of the animal body and its textual reinscription. Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood was in many ways Aristotelian in the sense that it demonstrated that, driven by vital forces, it was the same action of the heart that sustained both man and all animal life visible at that


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time. Yet, it was Platonic dualism that more closely resembled Descartes’ reconfiguration of Harvey’s discovery, whereby the heart functioned as a pump apparatus within the human and animal machine body. In Timeaus, Plato’s idealist description of the creation of the human body necessitated its partition into three zones, only one of which, the head, was made in close imitation of divinity—the vehicle of the immortal soul and thus definitively human. The chest encased the mortal soul: the place of the heart and the passions. As for the rest, that which lay below the diaphragm was the site of the carnal energy with which the gods were less enamored, of which Plato tells us: “there they bound it down like a wild animal which was chained up with man.”29 For Plato, while the human body has a necessary connectedness to the coarse materiality of the animal body, the purpose of human life was to break the chains of that connection in order to attain freedom. Over the long duration of the history of Christian ideas, this concept was essentially reconfigured and retained, but it was the Enlightenment project that offered the reconfiguration of this idea in the context of scientific instrumentalism that most closely approximates the way it recurs in our own time. The same model of flesh can be identified within mechanomorphic or biogenetic fantasies of the cyborg, both technological projects based on the will to sublate mortality. In the cyborg dream of power, the corporeal animality of man, like the animal itself, must at all costs be surpassed by the human will to power, knowledge, and the continuance of the self.

Posthuman Myth, Nonhuman Alterity The contemporary scientific contract with mute animality offers great promise in the promotion of human health and longevity of the body, and, as such, provides more tenable promises than the claims that digital technology will finally supersede the demands of the flesh, and the dead weight of the meat-world. Yet, both possibilities have their origins in the much older idea that mortality is a product of the animal self. Since early modernity, there have been alternative voices on the experience of embodiment such as the joyful materialism of Rabelais,30 and perhaps most significantly in the sustained critique of human hubris posed by Montaigne’s progressive humanism. Yet, the modern seventeenth-century mind was becoming more rational and gradually disengaged from the possibility posed by Montaigne of an animal language that was so eloquent that it was difficult for human beings to follow. That is, insofar as the Cartesian animal did not cry, or produce meaningful utterances or speech of any kind intelligible to men, language was becoming a much more human enterprise, and the vast engines of nature and capital started to run more quietly. From the outset of the Enlightenment project, the violent separation of the human from the animal established a rational instrumentalist paradigm based on the legacy of canonical theological principles. I propose that it is this same paradigm, rather than postmodernity, that has enabled the technological fantasy of the posthuman. Nonetheless, despite the canonical view of

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man as master of the world, Western theologians also warned against the sin of pride, and though the human right to rule nature was adapted in modernity, the medieval virtue of human modesty was eroded by instrumentalism. The early modern contract with mute animality is also our contract. Our flesh, like the feeling flesh of the animal, is the stuff of experience, feeling and tacit knowledge that can never be reduced to a mere epiphenomenon of speech or reason. Yet, human flesh is also motivated by speech, and by instrumental reason, and like our subjection of other fleshly beings, we are set to make human flesh accountable to will. What is at risk in this project is our ability to step beyond the myth of the autonomy of human subjectivity and a commensurate metaphysics of presence. If nothing else, the rejection of origin, materiality, and history compromises human self-knowledge at the expense of prosthetic empowerment. More to the point, it cancels out the possibilities of radical alterity that only the nonhuman world can provide. In effect, it leaves us with a human teleology in which spatial experience is reduced to the world as a kind of vast mirror, a most complex and ingenious mirror certainly, but a mirror nonetheless, from which alterity always exists beyond the scope of our vision. We may imagine a posthuman being capable of meeting our gaze, yet, as a configuration of human technology, the posthuman could only ever be an extension of the human. Thus, the machines we construct, or the flesh we engineer, will always bear the trace of the human. The animal is the embodied other of our world, and has the face and eyes that we are able to recognize as signs of nonhuman consciousness. Animals occupy the unique position toward which we can return a gaze in recognition of alterity, and thus we can open a space for a noninstrumentalist form of curiosity about an experience of embodiment that lies beyond the limits of the human.

Notes 1. Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein was also a modern day Prometheus. 2. See Gibson. 3. In the thirteenth century, the Dominican priests Albertus Magnus (1193–1280) and most especially St Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274) in the Summa Theologiae (1266–1273) pursued the theology of Christian dualism. Following the availability of Latin translations of the works of Aristotle in the mid-twelfth century, Medieval thought of the thirteenth century, according to David Knowles in The Evolution of Medieval Thought (221–234), was transformed by what has been described as a “philosophical revolution.” By 1270 the influence of Aristotelian naturalism had brought about a crisis between philosophy and theology, which Aquinas sought to address in his interpretation of Aristotle within the context of Christian dualism. Aquinas favored the Aristotelian view of a natural and laudable human need for knowledge as against the more Augustinian, and Platonist, emphasis on faith that had characterized the earlier twelfth century. Nonetheless, his entire worldview was based on Christian theological dualism. In Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, especially Book 2, he makes it very clear that animals have an entirely different and inferior status to that of man.


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4. See Descartes’ Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences. Descartes’ notion of the animal as machine occurs in Book 5. It was actually Descartes’ enthusiastic followers, however, who took a more exacting view of the limits of animal sentience and feeling than Descartes’ nuanced account. Malebranch’s Recherche de la Vérité, for example, is pitched against Montaigne’s sympathetic view of animal sentience. 5. Lyotard xxiv. 6. See Bowerbank, Lougee and Harth. 7. Apart from the industrialization and commodification of flesh in factory farms and abattoirs, the development of xenotransplantation, though not yet viable, will perhaps raise the level of cyborg exploitation of the nonhuman world to new levels. 8. Halberstam and Livingston 3. 9. Hayles 289. 10. See, in particular, Norbert’s Involvement and Detachment. 11. Mellor, 1997. 12. Dery 230–231. 13. When criticizing the invisibility of ciphers of the “informatics of domination,” Haraway writes: “They are floating signifiers moving in pickup trucks across Europe, blocked more effectively by the witch-weavings of the displaced and so unnatural Greenham women, who read cyborg webs of power very well, than by the militant labor of old masculinist politics, whose natural constituency needs defence jobs.” Haraway 2004, 12. 14. See An Interview with Donna Haraway conducted in two parts by Nina Lykke, Randi Markussen, and Finn Olesen. Haraway 2004, 325. 15. Haraway 1991, 149–181. 16. Galen was born in Pergamum in the second century, studied in Alexandria, and later practiced medicine in Rome where he became physician to Marcus Aurelius at the height of the Antonine age. His collected works exceed twenty volumes, including seventeen volumes of On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Human Body. Galen emphasized the role of a divine creator of the body, and the importance of the four humours underpinned his advocacy of bloodletting as a release of excessive humours. His understanding of anatomy was based on his many vivisections, and this knowledge was influential until the sixteenth century when Vesalius’s dissections of the human body provided new information. 17. See Cunningham and French 1999. 18. Cunningham 226. 19. Ibid. 233. 20. The image of the Andreas Vesalius frontispiece portrait can be seen at http:// vesalius.northwestern.edu/flash.html. 21. To view the title page to the 1543 edition, refer to http://vesalius.northwestern.edu/ flash.html. 22. French 1999, 240. 23. Heseler 290. 24. See Ferrari. 25. Hobbes, chapter 13. 26. Harvey 2. 27. Ibid. 19. 28. Harvey quoted in Keele 29. 29. Plato 492. 30. See Bakhtin.

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Bibliography Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1965. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. Bowerbank, Sylvia. Speaking for Nature Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Braudel, Fernand. The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible. Translated by Miriam Kocham. London: Collins, 1981. Cunningham, Andrew. The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients. Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1997. De Montaigne, Michel. 1595. An Apology for Raymond Sebond. Translated by M. A. Screech. London: Penguin, 1987. Dery, Mark. Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. New York: Grove Press, 1996. Descartes, Rene. 1637. Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences. In Descartes—Key Philosophical Writings, translated by E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Elias, Norbert, ed. 1939. The Civilising Process. Blackwell, Oxford, 2000. Ferrari, Giovanna. “Public Anatomy Lessons and the Carnival: The Anatomy Theatre of Bologna.” Past and Present 117 (1987): 50–106. Foucault, Michel. 1975. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. French, Roger. Dissection and Vivisection in the European Renaissance. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. ———. William Harvey’s Natural Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Garreau, Joel. Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing our Bodies— And What It Means to Be Human. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984. Halberstam, Judith and Ira Livingston, eds. Posthuman Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. ———. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. ———. The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. Harth, Erica. Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime. New York: Cornell University Press, 1992. Harvey, William. 1628. “Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals.” The Works of William Harvey MD. London: The Sydenham Society, Johnson Reprint Co. 1965. Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999. Heseler, Baldasar. 1540. Andreas Vesalius’ First Public Anatomy at Bologna: An Eyewitness Report. Translated by Ruben Eriksson. Uppsala: Almquist & Wiskells, 1959. Hobbes, Thomas. 1651. The Leviathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.


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Keele, Kenneth. William Harvey. London: Nelson, 1965. Knowles, David. The Evolution of Medieval Thought. London: Longman, 1962. Kusukawa, Sachiko. “Illustrating Nature.” In Books and the Sciences in History, edited by Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine, 90–113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Lougee, Carolyn. Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth Century France. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Malebranch, Nicolas. Recherche de la Vérité. Paris: 1647. Mellor, Mary. Feminism and Ecology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997. Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Norbert, Elias. Involvement and Detachment. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. Plato. Timaeus. The Dialogues of Plato. Translated by Barry Jowett. Vol. 3. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892. Pouchelle, Marie-Christine. The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages. Translated by Rosemary Morris. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. Vesalius, Andreus. 1543. On the Fabric of the Human Body. Translated by William Richardson and John Carmen. San Alsemo, California: Norman, 2002. Wear, Andrew, Roger French, and Iain Lonie, eds. The Medical Renaissance of the 16th Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Weber, Max. 1930. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. London: Routledge, 2001.


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M e ta(l)f l e sh Rosi Braidotti

Introduction Defining the Parameters

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commitment to critical theory may be seen as an addiction like any other. Contrary to most, however, it meets with a relatively high level of social approval. It is even tinged with a touch of intellectual prestige, which is the kind of prerogative mostly reserved nowadays for nonprofit activities. One such is philosophy, commonly understood as the gratuitous display of the human predisposition for mental restlessness. Intelligence, after all, is that peculiar human talent that can be described as a practice of suspicion of and chronic discontent with the obvious and the banal. Critical theory is a stubborn and proud addiction to this practice. The challenges are not slight. If the only constant at the dawn of the third millennium is change, then, how to think about processes, rather than concepts, is a rude necessity that stares us in our critical eyes. It’s difficult— accustomed as we are to thinking within the protocols of theoretical reason and the conventions that are the norm in social and political thought. In spite of the sustained efforts of many radical critics, the mental habit of linearity and objectivity persists in its hegemonic hold over our thinking. Thinking through flows and interconnections remains a difficult challenge, although most of us already inhabit a social world structured by flows and webs of connection. It is difficult to change one’s acquired habits—they are so addictive! An addiction is a sediment habit that is structurally necessary to one’s survival. It involves modes of relation to the external objects or activities that constitute the habit, and therefore it constructs moods of positive reliance upon, or empathic resonance with, them. This need not be an entirely anthropocentric exercise. For example, critical theorists may value some of their books more highly than some of their human siblings, but this reliance upon language, as well as to writing technologies—from the pencil to the palm computer—is both intense and expansive. This type of addictive activity spins the web of restless meanderings on the part of questioning bodily

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entities known as subjects. Yet it also stabilizes their patterns of motion, expansion, and stillness in a regular sequence that can be sustainable, or at least temporarily so. Such is the power of thought. Feminism is critical theory at its most paradigmatic, that is to say addictive. It shares with contemporary philosophies the critique of the delusions of grandeur of the subject that insists on believing that it coincides with consciousness, thus rationalizing His logocentrism. Feminist theory also embraces enthusiastically the call for more conceptual creativity, more imagination and courage in designing adequate and informed cartographies of the present. One of the specific aims of feminist practice is to overthrow the pejorative connotations that are built into the notion of difference and also into the dialectics of self and other. This faith in the possibility of such transmutations of values leads one to reassert the positivity of difference defined as the project enabling a collective reappraisal of the singularity of each subject in his/her complexity. In other words, the subject of feminism is not Woman as the complementary and specular other of Man but rather a complex and multilayered embodied subject that has taken her distance from the institutions of femininity and of masculinity, unhinging them both. “She” no longer coincides with the disempowered projections of a dominant subject who reflects the unwanted aspects of his masculinity by casting them upon her in a universalistic posture of appropriation. She, in fact, may no longer be a she at all, but rather the subject of quite another story: a subject-in-process, a mutant, the other of the Other, a promising monster,1 a post-Woman embodied subject cast in female morphology who has already undergone an essential metamorphosis. In short, a virtual feminine. The feminist subject of knowledge is intensive, multiple, and it functions in a net of interconnections. It is rhizomatic, which means it is non-unitary, nomadic, nonlinear, weblike, embodied, and therefore perfectly artificial. As an artifact this subject is machinic, complex, and thus endowed with multiple capacities for interconnectedness in the impersonal mode. It is abstract and perfectly, operationally, real. One of the main fields in which it operates is the metaphysically founded institution of sexual difference, which is not, however, immune from the flows of transformation that define our historicity. This “intensive” reading of feminist theory expresses a non-unitary, nomadic subject that is opposed to classical humanism, or liberal notions of the individual, but also to facile postmodern celebrations of fragmentation for its own sake. In opposition to the urge to complete the loss of specification or marking of the subject, this position expresses also my desire to defend the relevance of that historically obsolete institution known as the “feminine.” My position is aligned with a philosophical vision of materialism defined as the mindless vitality of embodied matter or enfleshed locations in a fundamentally restless mode. Politics begins with our passions. Feminism, like all critical theories, can express affirmative forces and thus liberate in those who partake of it a yearning for freedom, dignity, justice, lightness, and joyfulness. These values can

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also be translated both into dogmatic gloom and into rational beliefs and policies. They form in any case a substratum of affect that activates the movement in the first place. One must avoid the deadly serious revolutionary zeal of dogma and doxa joining forces within the gravitational pull of a new normative order. If politics begins with our passions, then what I yearn for is the gay knowledge of an affirmative critical movement: I want to put the “active” back into activism. The embodied structure of the subject is a key term understood as a point of overlap between the physical, the symbolic, and the material social conditions. The body is an interface, a threshold, a field of intersecting material and symbolic forces, it is a surface where multiple codes (race, sex, class, age, etc.) are inscribed; it is a cultural construction that capitalizes on energies of a heterogeneous, discontinuous, and affective or unconscious nature. This vision of the body contains sexuality as a process and as a constitutive element. Being embodied means being in and of sexualized matter. This sexual fiber is intrinsically and multiply connected to social and political relations; it is anything but an individualistic entity. Sexuality is simultaneously the most intimate and the most external, socially driven, power-drenched practice of the self. As a social, symbolic, material, and semiotic institution, sexuality is singled out as the primary location of power in a complex manner that encompasses both macro and micro relations. Sexual difference, the sexualized bipolarity, is another word for power in both the negative or repressive (potestas) and the positive or empowering (potentia) meaning of the term. Bodies-in-Space Even the most convinced social constructivists today argue that the performances of bodies cannot be ascribed exclusively to the social codes or to symbolic and imaginary orders—nor can they be read back into the Holy Scriptures of the DNA Scrolls. Both “nature” and “the body” are slippery categories—they tend to slide toward essentialism; get caught into positivist reductions, or in their opposite: new-age naive celebrations. In the age of the politics of biodiversity, the interdependence of the natural and the social needs to be explored outside classical, dualistic habits of thought. I prefer a deeply embedded vision of the embodied subject. In the light of contemporary genetics and molecular biology, it is more than feasible to speak of the body as a complex system of self-sustaining forces. The DNA and the cells communicate effectively with each other, transferring vital information. In terms of biodiversity, we humans are actively and destructively involved in manipulating our environment. Neurosciences have increased our understanding of memory and the extent to which the storage and retrieval of information is essential to the progress of the self. This is evidence that can no longer be ignored by critical, Left-leaning intellectuals. Nor need it be left to the delusions of grandeur of professional scientists and their industrial, financial backers.

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The body remains a bundle of contradictions: it is a zoological entity, a genetic data bank, while it also remains a biosocial entity, that is to say a slab of codified, personalized memories. As such, it is part animal and part machine; however, the dualistic opposition of the two, which our culture has adopted since the eighteenth century as the dominant model, is inadequate today. Contemporary science and technology in fact have reached right into the most intimate layers of the living organism and the structures of the self, dissolving boundaries that had been established by centuries of humanistic thinking. This means that we can now think of the body as an entity that inhabits different time zones simultaneously, and is animated by different speeds and a variety of internal and external clocks that do not necessarily coincide. It’s a body in process. I am defending here a radically materialist, antiessentialist vitalism attuned to the technological era, which could not be further removed from the illusion of wilful disembodiment that is promised by the contemporary technological culture or cyborg imaginary. Deleuze’s enfleshed, vitalistic but not essentialistic vision of the subject is a self-sustainable one, which owes a great deal to the project of an ecology of the self. As I argued earlier, 2 the rhythm, speed and sequencing of the affects as well as the selection of the forces are crucial to the process of becoming. It is the pattern of reoccurrence of these changes that marks the successive steps in the process, thus allowing for the actualization of forces that are apt to frame and thus express the singularity of the subject. What I want to argue, however, is that thinking through the body and not in a flight from it means confronting boundaries and limitations. The subject, in my view, lies at the intersections with external, relational forces. It’s about assemblages. Encountering them is almost a matter for geography: it’s a question of orientations, points of entry and exit, a constant unfolding. In this field of transformative forces, sustainability is a very concrete practice—not the abstract ideal that some of our development and social-planning specialists often reduce it to. It is a basic concept about the embodied and embedded nature of the subject. The sensibility to and availability for changes or transformation are directly proportional to the subject’s ability to sustain the shifts without cracking. The border, the framing, or containing practices are crucial to the whole operation, one that aims at affirmative and not dissipative processes of becoming—joyful-becoming (potentia)—as a radically ontological force of empowerment. Genevieve Lloyd’s remarkable study of Spinoza is helpful in explaining how such a vitalistic and positive vision of the subject is linked to an ethics of passion that aims at joy and not at destruction. If this is the case, the composition of the forces that propel the subject, the rhythm, speed, and sequencing of the affects as well as the selection of the constitutive elements are the key processes. It is the orchestrated repetition and reoccurrence of these changes that marks the steps in the process of becoming-intensive. In other words, the actualization of a field of forces, argues Lloyd, is the effect of an adequate dosage, while it is also, and simultaneously, the prerequisite for sustaining those same forces.

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Lloyd argues that Spinoza’s treatment of the mind as part of nature is a source of inspiration for contemporary environmental ethics. Especially in Deleuze’s rendition, Spinozist monism acts: “As a basis for developing a broader concept of ethology, a study of relations of individual and collective and being affected.”3 Lloyd carefully points out the difficulties involved in approaching Spinoza’s concept of ethics as “the collective powers and affinities of bodies,”4 except in terms of the ethology proposed by Deleuze. Both thinkers stand at odds with the mainstream of Western philosophy. I do think it important, however, to stress that sustainability is not so much about animal ethics or deep ecology as it is about decentering anthropocentrism. The notion of sustainability as a concept in the social and human sciences (and thus not only in the field of development and economics) attempts to reach a dual aim. On one hand it emphasizes the importance of change, transformation, and empowering growth. On the other, however, it combines these factors with an ethical concern for enduring and balanced models and speeds of transformation. As an ethical criterion, sustainability provides a differential answer to Deleuze’s question: “how much can a body take?” As such, it paves the way for a Spinozist, positive ethics of forces and changes. The ultimate implication is a displacement of the human in the new, complex compound that is nomadic subjectivity. The notion of sustainability brings together ethical, epistemological, and political concerns under the cover of a non-unitary vision of the subject. In so doing, I intend both to respond to the anti-post-structuralist critics who consider the unitary subject as the necessary precondition for moral and political agency and also wish to expound further on the ethical underpinnings of philosophical nomadism. Thinking the unity of body and mind with Spinoza, Deleuze stresses the power (potentia) of affects (affectus). Starting from the assumption that the property of substance is to express itself, the term “expression” implies “dynamic articulation”5 and not merely passive reflection. Affectus refers to the passage from one state to another in the affected body— the increase or decrease in its powers of acting.6

This “power of acting” is expressed by Spinoza in terms of achieving freedom through an adequate understanding of our passions and, consequently, of our bondage. Coming into possession of freedom requires the understanding of affects or passions by a mind that is always already embodied. The desire to reach an adequate understanding of one’s potentia is the human being’s fundamental desire or conatus. Reason is affective, embodied, dynamic; understanding the passions is our way of experiencing them and making them work in our favor. In this respect Spinoza argues that desires arise from our passions. Because of this, they can never be excessive—given that affectivity is the power that activates our body and makes it want to act. Human nature has, for Spinoza, inbuilt control mechanisms that prevent it from becoming self-destructive. The human being’s inbuilt tendency is toward joy and self-expression, not toward

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implosion. This fundamental positivity is the key to Deleuze’s attachment to Spinoza. Clearly, this is a very nonmoralistic understanding of ethics, which focuses on the subject’s powers to act and to express their dynamic and positive essence. It is an ethology, that is, a field of composition of forces. I would synthesize Lloyd and Deleuze’s reappraisal of Spinoza into the concept of a sustainable self that aims at endurance. Endurance has a temporal dimension: it has to do with lasting in time—hence duration and selfperpetuation (traces of Bergson here). But it also has a spatial side to do with the space of the body as an enfleshed field of actualization of passions or forces. It involves affectivity and joy (traces of Spinoza), as in the capacity for being affected by these forces, to the point of pain or extreme pleasure— which comes to the same; it means putting up with and tolerating hardship and physical pain. Apart from providing the key to an etiology of forces, endurance is also an ethical principle of affirmation of the positivity of the intensive subject, its joyful affirmation as potentia. The subject is a spatiotemporal compound that frames the boundaries of processes of becoming. This works by transforming negative passions into positive passions through the power of an understanding that is no longer indexed upon a phallogocentric set of standards but is rather unhinged and affective. This sort of turning of the tide of negativity is the transformative process of achieving freedom of understanding, through the awareness of our limits, of our bondage. This results in the freedom to affirm one’s potentia or joy through encounters and minglings with other bodies, entities, beings, and forces. And yet, the indicators are not all positive. Millions of women throughout the advanced world are on Prozac or other mood-enhancement drugs. The hidden epidemic of anorexia–bulimia continues to strike onethird of the females in the opulent world. Killer-diseases today don’t include only the great exterminators, such as cancer and AIDS, but also the return of traditional diseases that we thought we had conquered, such as malaria and tuberculosis. Our immunity system has readjusted to the antibiotics and we’re vulnerable again. There is no question that what we still go on calling—somewhat nostalgically—“our bodies, ourselves” are abstract technological constructs fully immersed in advanced psychopharmacology chemical industry, bioscience, and the electronic media. What is equally clear for me is that we need to be vigilant. The techno-hype is over and we need to assess more lucidly the price that we are paying for being so “high tech.” We got our prosthetic promises of perfectibility. Now, let’s hand over our pound of flesh, shall we? Bodies-in-Time From the spatial angle, a body is an enframed mass of forces with specific qualities, relations, speeds, and intensities, which is to say that a body is intelligent matter endowed with the capacity to be affected and to affect and thus to interrelate. Temporally speaking, on the other hand, a body is an enfleshed memory, that is, an organism that endures and lasts—albeit

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temporarily—by undergoing constant internal modifications following the encounter with other bodies and forces. The key terms are affectivity and interrelation. A body is an entity that yearns for, and thus actively desires, encounters and interrelations with others. This nomadic vision of desire as the positive longing for inner connections goes beyond the psychoanalytic idea of desire as lack, but it also avoids the normative mode in which it is often defined in philosophical thought. Affectivity is the heart of the subject and this desire to be moved by others is external: it happens in encounters with different bodies and forces, which propel the subject forward toward a dynamic horizon of shifting and multiple encounters. Being-in-time means essentially being or subject of/in memories. Remembering is about repetition and the retrieval of information. In the human subject, such information is stored throughout the physical experimental structure of the embodied self and not only in the “black box” of the psyche. It’s the whole body that functions as a slab of enfleshed genealogy. Remembering requires composition, selection, and dosage. Like a choreography of flows or intensities that require adequate framing in order to compose into a form of their own, memories coalesce through empathy and cohesion between their constitutive elements. Memories materialize like a quest for temporary moments, when an affective balance can be sustained, before the forces dissolve again and move on. And it goes on, never equal to itself but faithful enough to itself to endure and to pass on. Memory is fluid and flowing, it opens up unexpected or virtual possibilities, and it is transgressive in that it works against the programmes of the dominant memory-system. This continuous memory is, however, not necessarily or inevitably linked to “real” experience. Against the authority of “experience” and the extent to which the appeal to experience both confirms and perpetuates the belief in steady and unitary identity, I would rather link memory to the imagination. The imaginative, affective force of remembrance—that which returns and is remembered/repeated—is the propelling force in this idea. When you remember in the intensive or minority-mode, in fact, you open up spaces of movement, of de-territorialization, which actualize virtual possibilities that had been frozen in the image of the past.

Analytical Framework In-Between What’s Between Bodies and Machines The archetypical site of in-between-ness, or interactivity, has historically been the female body. Psychoanalysis shows that the female body is the screen where male fantasies and castration fears have been projected and performed. As such, it has been metonymically displaced and replaced over and over again. The radical edge of Lacanian politics consists in exploring this reduction of the feminine (imaginary) to women (empirical) and the masculine

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to men, stressing instead the instability of any subject and the impossibility of being anchored to the imaginary and binary institutions of masculinity and femininity. Exposing this imposture is Lacan’s political gesture. What can be done about changing any of it, however, is an off-limits question for psychoanalysis. Not so for feminism, of course.7 The female body therefore becomes the site for feminist reinscriptions and symbolic reappropriations of woman’s subjectivity. The symbolic being firmly grounded on material foundations, the female body is also the site of productive and reproductive labor all over the world. Women are the great industrial robots and agricultural workers of the earth. As the most underpaid workers, their intermedial function is to create surplus value. Thus, women, like machines, are great conductors and connectors; their circulation, and the circulation of the goods they produce and reproduce, literally makes the world go round. It is no coincidence then that the technological other holds a strong link to the feminine in its functionality and availability for usage. In high modernity the mechanic body double, the technological artifact, is sexualized in the feminine mode and is eroticized accordingly. The woman’s body functioned as the site of inscription of the artificial or mechanical other, as in Metropolis and L’Êve future. This followed from the principle of functionalism. In the modernist mode, tasks that are usually performed by women, animals, or others are delegated to the machines. This is the case of vacuum cleaners, household appliances, and the technologies that replace basic motion functions, such as bicycles and cars. The technological artifact as a zone of transition is libidinally charged in that it represents a connection, a link or an in-between. Machines make connections: cogs and spikes and tubes penetrate each other with fierce and mindless energy. To the extent that it mimes the workings of sexual energy, the technological other fulfils a libidinal function. Techno-bodies question the boundary between the functional and the gratuitous, productivity and waste, moderation and excess. Gratuitousness, or the principle of nonprofit, is central to the erotic power of the machine. Historically, automata fulfilled a decorative function, which was explored and exploited in clockwork machinery, music boxes, street organs, “tableaux vivants” of all sorts, and mechanical dolls and toys. Like freaks, automata are for display and delight of children of all ages. Anthropomorphic machines, being eroticized as objects of imaginary projection and desire, titillate our sexual curiosity and trigger all kinds of questions about sexuality and procreation. With contemporary technologies there is a lot that changes: digital and electronic technologies intersect and intermingle with the flesh in multiple, intimate ways that transfer the prosthetic function into the body. Video recorders, electronic toothbrushes, frozen embryos and IVF, breast implants, telefax, phone chat-lines, and so on, bring this kind of technological others right within the parameters of the embodied self. This could be described as a form of vampirism, or Gothic takeover of the human body by advanced technologies. A perversely fruitful alliance with technology has emerged,

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which stresses the proximity and familiarity of the relation between the human and the technological universe.8 Consequently, it is no longer possible to speak about simple in-between spaces, about spaces between bodies and technologies—nor of a simple delegation process. It is rather a case of degrees of both delegations and in-between-ness.9 For instance, the maternal function, traditionally a task that was socially delegated to and performed by embodied female agents, has nowadays become successfully assimilated by advanced technologies. The techno-doctors and their incubators, genetic engineering, and the sperm banks and their donors and inserters are the sites of human reproduction. Women are very much participants in this new social consensus about technology-mediated reproduction and its commercial spin-offs, all the more so because their body is no longer the sole theater where the game of filiation is played. In our cyber-universe the link between the flesh and the machine is symbiotic, creating a bond of mutual dependence. Paradoxically, the corporeal site of subjectivity is simultaneously denied, in a fantasy of escape, and strengthened or reinforced.10 The corollary of this is that technology today is no longer associated with a specific sex—let alone the feminine, as it was in modernity, but rather neutralized as a figure of mixity, hybridity, interconnectiveness. It lies in a sexually undecided position, an in-between state such as transexuality; it is a queering device. If the machine is prosthetic and trans-gendered and the maternal has become mechanized, the embodied female agent is unhinged from its classical frame of sexual difference, floating into a sort of undifferentiated process of becoming-other. Hybridity is the capacity to blur categorical distinctions or constitutive boundaries. The dividing line between masculine and feminine is one of the major socio-symbolic boundaries currently under reconstruction, as Lyotard argued. Equally prominent nowadays is the relocation of the distinction between different species—the human, the animal, the organic other, the inorganic other, the technological. The blurring of these categorical divides between self and others creates a sort of heteroglossia of the species, a colossal hybridization. Technology is at the heart of this process that combines monsters, animals, insects, and machines into a transversal posthuman takeover of what we used to call “the subject.” To say that this takeover transforms identities and sexualities is an understatement at best: the very political ontology of otherness is dislocated in the process. This raises a number of crucial questions. If the female body is a site of scrambling of the code of femininity, while the technological other is the site of schizoid transsexuality and hybrid in-between-ness, what will the consequences be for the socio-symbolic organizations of our culture? Just consider the kind of schizoid combinations that proliferate in our postindustrial landscapes: machinic takeover of the maternal function; feminism without women; reproduction without uteruses; sperm banks without penises; money without cash; beer without alcohol; communication without contact; displacement without movement. These contaminations are virtual only in

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the sense that they concretize and materialize yet unseen possibilities. They are ways of literalizing what techno-bodies are capable of and thus confront us with this challenge in an embodied and embedded manner. The virtual has firm roots, foundations, and spin-offs; it is a material event. Technobabes and cyber-babies proliferate, just as Western demographies plummet. Through these paradoxes, in late postmodernity, the body remains a privileged site of transformation and reinscription of the natural through reincorporation of the technological. It does fall within a political economics of representation that is no longer specular but rather spectral. The eternal return of the never-dead images. Quest for adequate figurations of these mutant subject-positions. The reinvention of a post-naturalistic natural order lies at the heart of our technological universe. Susan Squier sums it up in three key images: the extrauterine fetus, the surrogate mother, and the pregnant man. On the other hand, Donna Haraway crystallizes the process of the reinvention of nature in the mirror images of the female man,11 the Onco mouse and the figuration of the critical thinker as modest witness. These reconfigurations of a naturalized techno-world, following from the impact of advanced technologies, are contemporary variations on the theme of recombined spectral subjectivity. Biocentered Egalitarism If contemporary techno-bodies can be defined as complex systems of selfsustaining forces, it is therefore important to rethink the subject from the assumption of a convergence between biotechnologies and information technologies.12 The techno-bodies of late postindustrial societies are embedded in complex fields of information, which engender both their explosion into sets of regulatory social practices (dieting, medical control, and pharmaceutical interventions), as well as their implosion as the fetishized and obsessive object of individual concern and care (self-management or all-out prevention of anything that moves). The political economy changes accordingly: biopower13 constructs the body as a multilayered entity situated over a multiple and potentially contradictory set of variables. The “informatics of domination” or spectral economy14 enmeshes the body in data-flows of the semiotic, genetic, and neurological kind, which redefines it as an integrated site of information networks. A working image, it processes and reactivates its own visual archive. The body is like a sensor, a messenger carrying thousands of communication systems: cardiovascular, respiratory, visual, acoustic, tactile, olfactory, hormonal, psychic, emotional, erotic, and so on. Coordinated by an inimitable circuit of information transmission, the body is a living recording system, capable of storing and then retrieving the necessary information and to process it at such speed that it seems to react “instinctively.” Fundamentally prone to pleasure, the embodied subject tends toward the recollection and repetition of experiences that pleasure has “fixed” psychically and sensually upon the subject. To remember, after all, is to repeat, and

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repetition tends to favor that which gave joy and avoid that which gave pain. The body is not only multifunctional but also in some ways multilingual: it speaks through temperature, motion, speed, emotions, excitement that affects the cardiac rhythm, and the likes. It is a piece of meat activated by electric waves of desire, a script written by the unfolding of genetic encoding, a text composed by the enfolding of external prompts. Neither a sacralized inner sanctum nor a socially shaped entity, the enfleshed nomadic subject is rather an “in-between”: it is a folding-in of external influences and a simultaneous unfolding outward of affects. It is a mobile entity, an enfleshed sort of memory that repeats; capable of lasting through sets of discontinuous variations while remaining faithful to itself in its radical immanence. This vision of the body is central to the corporeal materialism of nomadic subjectivity. It combines an interest in the antiessentialist notion of embodiment, and hence attention to techno-cultural factors, with renewed emphasis on vitalism, or the very concept of “Life itself.” It is very difficult to find a twenty-first-century word to describe adequately, that is to say, lucidly, secularly, fairly and with a sense of social justice, what is commonly referred to as “life.” Life is half animal: zoe (zoology, zoophilic, zoo); and half discursive: bios (biology). Zoe, of course, is the poor half of a couple that foregrounds bios defined as intelligent life. Centuries of Christian indoctrination have left a deep mark here. The relationship to animal life, to zoe, rather than bios, constitutes one of those qualitative distinctions upon which Western reason erected its empire. Bios is holy, zoe quite gritty. That they intersect in the human body turns the physical self into a contested space, that is, a political arena. The mind–body dualism has historically functioned as a shortcut through the complexities of this in-between contested zone. I believe that one of the most persistent and unhelpful fictions that is being told about human “life” is its alleged self-evidence, its implicit worth. Zoe is always second-best and the idea of life carrying on independently of, even regardless of and at times in spite of, rational control is the dubious privilege attributed to the nonhumans. This covers all of the animal kingdoms as well as the classical “others” of metaphysically based visions of the subject, namely the sexual other (woman) the ethnic other (the native). In the old regime, this used to be called “Nature.” The point here is that, traditionally, the self-reflexive control over life is reserved for the humans, whereas the mere unfolding of biological sequences is for the nonhumans, given that the concept of “the human” has been colonized by phallogocentrism and has come to be identified with male, white, heterosexual, Christian, property-owning, standard-language-speaking citizens. However, since Darwin and evolutionary theory, the rest, comprising the nonhuman zoe, has grown to encompass increasingly large and central zones of the human. Contemporary scientific practices have forced us to touch the bottom of some inhumanity that connects to the human precisely in the immanence of its bodily materialism. With the collapse of the qualitative divide between the human and His (the gender is no coincidence) others, the deep vitality of the embodied self has resurfaced from under

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the crust of the old metaphysical vision of the subject. A metamorphosis, which is no metaphor—but something closer to a metabolic mutation. This is the bottom line. This obscenity, this life in me, is intrinsic to my being and yet so much “itself,” that it is independent of the will, the demands and expectations of the sovereign consciousness. This zoe makes me tick and yet escapes the control of the supervision of the Self. Zoe carries on relentlessly and gets cast out of the holy precinct of the “me” that demands control and fails to obtain it. It thus ends up being experienced as an alien other. This potency (potentia) of Life is experienced as “other” by a mind that cannot do anything else but fold upon itself in narcissism and paranoia, the two pillars on which the West was won. Consciousness goes patrolling its own constitutive borders as if it were in charge of them. Life is experienced as inhuman, but only because it is all too human; obscene, because it lives mindlessly on. This scandal, this wonder, this zoe, that is to say an idea of Life that is more than bios and supremely indifferent to logos, this piece of flesh called my “body,” this aching meat called my “self,” expresses the abject/divine potency of a Life that consciousness lives in fear of. Nomadic subjectivity is, by contrast, in love with zoe. It’s about the posthuman as becoming-animal, becoming-other, becoming-insect—trespassing all metaphysically grounded boundaries. Ultimately becoming imperceptible and fading, death being just another time sequence within the spectral economy of techno-bodies. The significant thing about posthuman bodies is not so much that they occupy the spaces in between what is between the human, the animal, and the machines, that is to say, a dense materiality. Posthuman bodies are also surprisingly generative, in that they stubbornly and relentlessly reproduce themselves. The terms of their reproduction are slightly offbeat by good old human standards in that they involve animal, insect, and inorganic models. In fact they represent a whole array of possible alternative morphologies and “other” sexual and reproductive systems. The model is that of viral proliferation—a lapse in our immunity system. The paradigm of cancerous proliferation of cells is mentioned as an example of this mindless selfduplicating capacity of generative/life. This marks a shift in terms of a new political paradigm: we are at the end of the post-nuclear model of embodied subjectivity and we have entered the “viral” or “parasitic” mode. This is a graphic way of explaining the extent to which today’s body is immersed in a set of technologically mediated practices of prosthetic extension. It expresses in fact the coextensivity of the body with its environment or territory. A body is a portion of forces life-bound to the environment that feeds it. All organisms are collective and interdependent. Parasites and viruses are hetero-directed: they need other organisms. Admittedly, they relate to them as incubators or hosts, releasing their genetically encoded message with evident glee. This expresses a selfish cruelty that horror movies capture perfectly, but it is a mere detail in a much broader picture. The virus/parasite constitutes a model of a symbiotic relationship that defeat binary oppositions. It is a simulacrum that duplicates itself to infinity

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without any representational pretensions. As such, it is an inspiring model for a nomadic eco-philosophy. Modes of In-Between-ness The key word is indeed contaminations. The spaces between ourselves and our technologies are a site of transition, filled with dense materialities, of symbiotic interconnections, and unsuspected mutual cross-fertilizations. There is no longer a space between us and the technological artifacts that we delegate to. There are only degrees of in-between-ness, of complicity, or promiscuity. The age of prosthetics has displaced the form of anthropocentric delegation or consensual mediation, to which we had become accustomed in industrial modernity. A new form of viral or contaminating intimacy has taken its place.15 A social reaction of panic often accompanies these transformations, triggering either neoconservative returns to an allegedly naturalized past, which should rescue us from our inhumane posthuman future16 or restore us to a humanistic faith in the decency of the rational order.17 I situate myself elsewhere, in transition and on the side of Haraway,18 in affirming the positive aspects of “the promises of monsters.” I am accustomed to a posthuman condition that has already taken firm roots here and now.19 (In this approach I recognize the legacy of that tradition of bodily materialist philosophies of the subject, which I call my own.) I also want to challenge some of the self-destructive or nihilistic tendencies of our cyber-universe. Nomadism is an antiessentialist vitalistic philosophy that calls for rethinking human embodiment in a manner that is coextensive with our complex technological habitat and in tune with our techno-habits. Deleuze shows that both the established ideas of the organic and those of the mechanical world are equally inadequate and often result in the humanistic vision of assembled parts working together to create a harmonious and well-functioning whole. In opposition to this holistic view of the mechanical world, Deleuze defends a molecular, machinic one, which is about becomings, without ultimate purpose or finality. The “machine” in the abstract sense proposed by Deleuze bears a privileged bond with the process of becoming-imperceptible, in the sense of an empirical transcendental capacity by the subject for dissolution into and merging with his/her environment.20 The merger of the human with the technological, or the machinic, environment, not unlike the symbiotic relationship between the animal and its habitat, results in a new compound, a new kind of open whole. This is neither a holistic fusion nor a Christian form of transcendence—it rather marks the materialist plane of radical immanence. This in-between-ness is best addressed not as biology, and certainly not as bioethics, but as an ethology of forces; an ethics of mutual interdependence and of sustainable interactions. Bodies have become techno-cultural constructs immersed in networks of interconnections and thus of self-contradictory and conflicting power relations.

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The culture of advanced capitalism—always loath to miss a good opportunity when it raises its ugly head—tends to react to the new techno-bodies of the cyber-world according to a predictable manic-depressive double-pull: on the one hand, hype, and on the other, nostalgia. And in between, Prozac Nation. Speaking from a different field of addiction—to critical theory—I would plea for a form of neo-materialist appreciation for the embodied intelligence of critical questioning entities known as subjects. Rethinking the embodied structure of human subjectivity requires an ethics of lucidity, as well as powers of innovation and creativity. It need not refer to the paradigms of human nature in terms of any of the traditional brands of essentialism: biological, psychic, genetic, or historical. This nomadic evolutionary thought contrasts openly with contemporary evolutionary psychology or genetic neo-determinism. What implodes under the strain and the velocity of this change is the perspective of anthropocentrism that is built in so much evolutionary, biological, scientific, and philosophical thought. Radically immanent philosophical nomadism, on the other hand, sponsors a posthuman subject that is impacted upon and thus composed of external forces, of the nonhuman, whether of inorganic or technological kind. It is territorially based and thus environmentally bound. This subject is non-unitary because it is relocated across a number of cultural, social and technological fields and practices. It also remains involved in the pursuit of active processes of becoming, through the creation of sustainable mixes and compositions of forces and affects. This is as far removed from the advanced capitalist hype about technology as can be. The latter constitutes an all-pervasive master-narrative of flight from the human embodied self into the fake transcendence of a machine aiming at short-term profit, with the aims of advanced capitalism and its belligerent economy. This strikes me as a molar, oedipalizing, despotic, and profit-minded approach. It is against this form of techno-domination that I want to argue for a more empowering, and hence more dissipative, eroticized and flowing interaction between the human and the biotechnological. An evolution of the non-teleological, but rather the nomadological kind, as my friend Kathy Acker said.

Questions of Ethical Values Moods of In-Between-ness What forms of symbolic mediation become possible and even necessary under the impact of the new prosthetic bodies we have come to inhabit? The advanced technologies enable a short-circuiting of traditional social roles and a great deal of experimentation with alternatives. They introduce a mild form of schizophrenia, in that they induce a multiplication and splintering of possible roles and time-sequences within each subject. What sort of ethical subjectivity does this shift of perspective call for? In reproductive technologies, for instance, you may donate the sperm, or rent out the uterus, but may

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not want to either claim or raise the baby. On Internet, one may say or act in ways that conflict with one’s everyday behavior in the three-dimensional world.21 Military Techno-bodies freeze our senses. The key question is precisely the extent to which new forms of technological embodiment displace or replace the symbolic function. What are the limits of these symbolic dislocations? In the spectral economy of contemporary Techno-bodies, in the age of suicide-bombers, one may delegate a great deal of crucial and even vital functions to others, but, when it comes to it, can someone else die in your place? What kind of symbolic delegation is this? It becomes important to assess what kind and degree of symbolic displacement occurs through these new configurations of in-between locations of technologically mediated bodies. In order to know the difference, we need a system of ethical evaluation of the forces or investments that are being made of these technologies. Of special concern to me is the affirmative dimension of this ethical question, namely, how to move beyond the aporia of deconstruction, or a post-Lacanian exacerbation of the guilt and aggression that fuel the phallic symbolic. How can we grab the historic chance to create the new and thus avoid flat repetitions of the same, through the disguise of quantitative cumulation of changes? One of the many positive side effects of dependency on feminist ethics is that one gets used to time loops, or a permanent state of jetlag. A feminist critical position assumes the dislocation of the linearity of time and hence the necessity to inhabit different and even potentially contradictory time zones at the same time: a sort of trip through chrono-topia. On the theoretical level, feminists have developed critiques of ideologies, revisions of the symbolic, and a vast array of counter-models and paradigms to configure the shifts of subjectivity actually in progress in our globalized world. Those who were still hoping to use such immense creativity to correct the mistakes of the patriarchal order soon realized they would run out of time before they could reach their aim. One of the possible figurations of oppression is being systematically behind: living in one time zone behind the times—like reading yesterday’s paper. It is not so much being second-best as being minus-one. I can give a concrete example from my own politics of location as a privileged twenty-first century subject in a cutting-edge university setting, engaged in critical theory. The point is that “I” is not only “there” and not even “that.” I am not one, because I am socio-symbolically signified as a woman, but also because I claim back my not-oneness as a political location. So there is a part of me that is too well aware of the persisting patterns of marginalization and exclusion of women in the world today. Were I to put this awareness aside, I would make a functional subject of advanced capitalism and a worthy one, being myself an institutional manager of female emancipation. Yet I will not. Choosing to resist this monological reduction, I acknowledge instead the multiplication of my possible locations, which are not only spatial but also temporal. My memories splinter and proliferate accordingly, bringing in data that may or may not relate directly to my lived experience but are integral to my consciousness.

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Whenever I fail to forget the continuing patterns of marginalization of women, I simply “forget to forget,” which does not mean that I fall into a stupor, but rather that I am zigzagging across different time sequences. Forgetting to forget the imperative of one-way time travel, I inhabit my critical consciousness as a time machine that allows me to travel across different realities, or spatiotemporal coordinates. Being a critical female subject, inscribed asymmetrically into the power relations of advanced capitalism, splits me temporarily. Attempting to reconcile the pieces would be madness: better to settle into the everyday schizophrenia of late postmodernity, also known as early global techno-culture. I call this a form of active resistance, understood as a strategy to deal with the typical schizophrenia of our times. Schizophrenia means the co-occurrence of internally contradictory and even incompatible trends and time zones. And the status of women is a powerful indicator of these. These are historical times that see the return of the most primitive forms of naturalization of the status of women, alongside high technological celebration about the death of the naturalized order. Women with Burkha next to Dolly the sheep (now mummified and in a museum). Times when geopolitical wars are being justified in the light of the backward status of women in non-Christian cultures. More than ever, sexual difference is exacerbated and polarized. Gender roles and stereotypes, far from being effaced, are strengthened in the new militarized world order. Hence, the status of women is both central to and paradoxically multiplied across the social and political agenda. In such a context, the feminist awareness of internal discrepancies, or differences within the subject, becomes quite a vantage viewpoint. Feminist reappropriations of feminine specificity strike a dissonant note in this framework to mark forms of political resistance: a multiplicity of possible strategies, internally contradictory, paradoxical, and nonlinear. They may not be one united party, but a kind of a kaleidoscope of maybe potentially contradictory strategies. This claim to feminist specificity is not a way of blocking nomadic subjectivization but rather of actualizing it. Very much a child of my schizoid times, I believe we need visions and practices of complex and multiple differences as an antidote to the fortifying of unitary identities that is happening through the global world order these days: a resurgence of many specular forms of fundamentalism. While fundamentalism is about claiming as authentic an identity others taught you to despise, feminism is about suspending belief in all authentic identities. We need a weblike approach, a zigzagging pattern that cuts across the paradoxes, the asymmetrical locations, and the revival of brutal power relations that underscore them, because not one linear or progressive political line can account for them all. If power relations are not linear, nor is resistance. Positively So This posthumanist vision of embodiment combines a nonessentialist form of bodily materialism with a commitment to change and transformation. In

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feminist theory, this combination enacts and supports the methodological and political strategy of “the politics of location.” It also fosters a philosophical style of critical thinking, which refuses to equate criticism with negativity and leaves ample room to the imagination and to conceptual creativity. This style is exemplified by the notion of “becoming,” in the sustainable sense I have defended in this essay. It raises the need of creating adequate figurations for this positive, dynamic, and accountable vision of the thinking subject. Philosophy is linked to positive affects. Affirming positive political passions is the key to generating affirmative affects. This expresses a nomadic kind of loyalty, not so much to what one is, or could be, as to what one would have been. This is a new form of activism, which takes seriously the active force of affects understood as affirmative ethical inputs. I call them positive processes of becoming, which are neither abstract nor disengaged from concrete material and historical situations. They are processes of actualization or materialization of qualitative shifts that occur across a number of interrelations or in-between spaces: between different species: human/nonhuman actors; different categories: masculine/ feminine or European/native; and between different forces: negative/positive or reactive/active. How can we establish ethical categorical distinctions between different types of becoming? Deleuze and Guattari argue that processes of becoming are collective, so that one can only know them by getting involved in them.22 Moreover, they are non-teleologically ordained processes of transformation, which means that none is truly in charge of them. No one is in charge of the course of historical developments—pace. Hegel and his Marxist disciples, down to Toni Negri, 23 do not seem able to kick off the addiction to totalizing master-plans. The only way to make sense of the schizoid economy of our times is by thinking in a nonlinear and yet rigorous and sustainable manner about accelerations, speed, and movement, that is to say, processes of becoming. We need to think about them not merely in quantitative terms but also as qualitative or ethical distinctions.24 Deleuze and Guattari argue that the molar or sedentary and the molecular or nomadic distinction must not be reset in a dialectical opposition: they are neither opposites nor mutually exclusive. They represent an ethical indexation system that can help us organize qualitative distinctions among the different forces that are invested in and circulating across social processes. Molar is reactive or negative, molecular is active or affirmative. There is no becoming in the molar mode: the center is static. By extension, terms such as nomadic or molecular are ways of introducing qualitative ethical distinctions into this script by stressing the positive or active forces involved in the processes of transformations. This in turn is a way of demarcating them from general processes of change that, being central to the political economy of advanced capitalism, are a-moral, generally profit-driven, if not downright immoral. Therefore, molecular/sedentary and molar/nomadic are not empirical categories. They are not quantitative pluralities but qualitative multiplicities, or lines that cut across existing categories. The point is not to opt

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for one of these and adopt them fully, but rather to engage with the affective forces they express. In other words, radical politics in the third millennium can be both emancipatory and sedentary, and radical or nomadic; the logic is not that of either/or, but rather of and/and. Ethical balance is just a matter of creating the condition for synchronicity among parallel forces and frames so that we can sustain affirmative processes of change. We can translate this in terms of the time sequence, by arguing that there are qualitative differences between different forms of becoming. If we start from the assumption that consumerism is the logic behind the enforced accelerations of our times, then we could argue that capitalism steals the present. We are always behind, that is, oppressed, and the next generation of gadgets is still to come. You may have Microsoft Windows 2000, but forget it, you should already have 2003, or maybe it should be 2020? Matrix 2 is out—but number 3? The next instalment of Harry Potter is about to come out, but there are several more coming and who knows if we will live to read them. Lord of the Rings is also tantalizingly slow in actualizing itself. They have succeeded in stealing our present: we all live in a state of regulated frustration and suspended animation, addicted to logos and gadgets to consume. In such a context, the time travel of consciousness that I mentioned before acquires another aspect, which leads me to Deleuze’s idea of the “becoming-imperceptible.” Let us think back to the simultaneity of different time zones that a third-millennium feminist inhabits. Emancipatory feminist politics looks toward the past in so far as it attempts to correct it. Like Benjamin’s angel of history, it stresses the need to catch up and bring women into full citizenship rights. We need to give women the vote, and not only in non-Christian lands, but, till a few years ago, also in countries such as Switzerland. It is progressive but backward looking. You could argue therefore that these processes of becoming are limited in the new perspectives they can unfold. The best you can do is to catch on, and hence risk a flat repetition of the aspects of linear history that, for better or for worse, have already happened before. The process of becoming—becomingminoritarian, -woman, -animal—is a way of marking off ethical distinctions that liberate the subject from the sedentary risk of flat repetition by introducing a different velocity or affective speed into this process. Taking the risk of repetition—the awareness of the inevitability of vicious circles—is the only way to break out of the molar or sedentary mode. Repetition with a difference is a feminist strategy of resisting the gravitational pull of the same—flat mimesis without difference—in order to inject healthy doses of disruption or unpredictability into the process. This process of speeding up detaches the present from its backward-looking tendencies and introduces another time sequence that actively creates the future by innovating on the past. In my view, this is the “event” that Deleuze theorizes as the “becoming-imperceptible,” marking the eruption of the future into the present. It is like a floodgate of creative forces that makes it possible to actually be fully inserted into the here and now, defined as the unfolding of potentials but also the enfolding of qualitative shifts or

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relocations within the subject. The paradoxical price to pay for that is some sort of death of one’s ego, or social identity, or all the identity labels that are socially enforced and thus institutionalized, such as being woman, white, European, and so on. The process of becoming thus results in the death of the ego in favor of a proliferation of generative possibilities of an altogether different kind. Carried by one’s affirmative passions—or life-enhancing addictions—one can undergo sustainable processes of un/enfolding or becoming. These entail, paradoxically and productively, the evanescence of the self. Ultimately, all one has is what one is propelled by and not in charge of, namely, one’s affects. One is constructed in these transitions and through these encounters: one is not, one becomes a series of not-ones, to the infinite power. We could rethink this with various brands of secular spirituality. I prefer to think of becoming as the necessary death of the self, understood as the social clearing house of conventions, a by-product of potestas, or institutionalization processes. The dislocation of the social self brings the subject to some point of evanescence, which may cost one’s immediate social identity, but in return one undergoes a qualitative leap toward an enlarged and empowered sense of what one is indeed capable of becoming. It is a qualitative leap toward a sustainable future. It as an eruption of the future: an event, but it has the paradoxical quality of something that takes place between the “no longer” and the “not yet.” By disrupting the time sequence, the event makes it impossible to identify with and hence name any substantive content. The event is an act or occurrence for which there is no immediate representation. Becoming is the path and the record of this event. It is impossible to locate the act of becoming either in relation to the past or in relation to the future as we know it. In that state the individual that desired it is already gone and the one who would welcome it is not yet here. Such is the paradox of subjectivity at the height of its process of becoming other than itself. Alive. This is the process of becoming-imperceptible as the redefinition of spaces of interrelation and of the time frame that accompanies them. Loyal to my habits, I see it as the other, the nomadic face of politics: the eruption of a “virtual feminine” as a singular universal that accomplishes a qualitative leap toward the affirmation of positivity. No longer the Molar “Woman,” not yet the singular universal in its fullness, it is the site of a qualitative transformation—the non-place where the “no longer” and the “not yet” reverse into each other, unfolding-out and enfolding-in their respective “outsides.” This short-circuits linear time and causes a creative conflagration. It propels a leap of faith in the world and as such it is an act that has no place; it cannot be understood apart from the transformation it produces; becoming is a way of configuring the leap itself, the actual process of transmutation of values that will propel us out of the void of critical negativity into the paradoxically generative void of full affirmation. It is a seduction into life that breaks from the spectral economy. At that point of becoming, all a subject can do is mark her/his assent and respectfully merge with it. Some call it adoration, but that would be altogether another trip.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Haraway 1992. Braidotti 1992. Lloyd 18. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 72. Irigaray 1974, 1977, 1984. Bukatman. Sobchack. Springer. Haraway 1997. Halberstam and Livingston. Foucault. Haraway 1997. Ansell. Fukuyama. Habermas. Haraway 1992. Hayles. Patton. Hayles. Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 1980. Hardt and Negri. Massumi.

Bibliography Acker, Kathy. “The End of the World of White Men.” In Posthuman Bodies, edited by J. Halberstam and Ira Livingston, 57–73. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Ansell Pearson, Keith. Viroid Life. Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Braidotti, Rosi. “Essentialism.” In Dictionary of Feminism and Psychoanalysis, edited by Elizabeth Wright, 77–83. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. ———. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1972. L’anti-Oedipe. Capitalisme et schizophrénie I. Paris: Minuit. Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane. New York: Viking Press/Richard Seaver, 1977. ———. 1980. Mille plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie II. Paris: Minuit. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Foucault, Michel. L’ordre du discours. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. Franklin, Sarah, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacey. Global Nature, Global Culture. London: Sage, 2000.

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Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future. London: Profile Books, 2002. Guattari, Felix. 1992. Chaosmose. Paris: Galilée. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Sydney: Power Publications, 1995. Habermas, Jurgen. The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. Halberstam, Judith and Ira Livingston, eds. Posthuman Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Haraway, Donna. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium: FemaleMan©_Meets_ Oncomouse™. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. ———. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” In Cultural Studies, edited by L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and A. Treichler, 295–337. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. ———. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Irigaray, Luce. 1974. Spéculum. De l’autre femme. Paris: Minuit. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. ———. 1977. Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un. Paris: Minuit. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 1985b. ———. 1984. L’éthique de la différence sexuelle. Paris: Minuit. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993. Lloyd, Genevieve. Spinoza and the Ethics. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Lyotard, Jean-François. L’ Inhumain. Causeries sur le temps. Paris: Galilee, 1988. Massumi, Brian. A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Boston: Massachusets Institute of Technology Press, 1992. Patton, Paul. Deleuze and the Political. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. Sobchack, Vivian. “Beating the Meat/Surviving the Test or How to Get Out of This Century Alive.” Body & Society 1. 3–4 (1995): 209–214. Springer, Claudia. Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Squier, Susan. “Reproducing the Posthuman Body: Ectogenetic Fetus, Surrogate Mother, Pregnant Man.” In Posthuman Bodies, edited by Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, 113–134. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.


L ist of C on t r i bu t or s

Edwina Bartlem is an art curator and writer with a specific interest in video, new media, and biological art practice. Until recently, she taught cinema and new media studies in the Cinema Program at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she is currently completing a PhD on immersive aesthetics in new media art. At present, she is the Curator and Arts Programmer at Manningham Gallery in Melbourne. Her recent publications include: “Immersive Artificial Life” in the Journal of Australia Studies (Issue 84, 2005), “Coming Out on a Hell Mouth” in Refractory: Journal of Entertainment Media (Vol 2, 2003). Rosi Braidotti is professor of women’s studies in the Arts Faculty of Utrecht University and scientific director of the Netherlands Research School of Women’s Studies and of the Expertise Centre Gender and Multiculturalism (GEM). She has been a fellow in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and has been involved extensively in European cooperation in Women’s Studies for many years. She chaired the European Subject Area Evaluation of Women’s Studies in 1995. This led to ATHENA, the European Thematic Network of Women’s Studies for the SOCR ATES program of the commission of the European Union. Furthermore, she founded the inter-European university exchange program, NOISE, linking ten universities in different European countries, which offers a yearly European Summer School from interdisciplinary and multicultural perspectives. She has published extensively in feminist philosophy, epistemology, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis. She serves as an advisor to the journals: Signs, differences and The European Journal of Women’s Studies (http://www.let.uu.nl/~Rosi.Braidotti/personal). Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich and, since 2007, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, she has also written articles in the area of gender studies, psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory, and visual culture. Her book publications include Over Her Dead Body. Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents, Sylvia Plath, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema, Die Diva: Geschichte einer Bewunderung, and her collection of essays Liebestod und Femme Fatale. Der Austausch sozialer Energien zwischen Oper, Literatur und Film. She has also coedited Death

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and Representation and Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century. A cultural history of the night, Tiefer als der Tag gedacht: Szenen der Nacht, will appear in 2008. Current research projects include a book on Queen Elizabeth I as the first diva, an introduction to the writings of Stanley Cavell (Junius Verlag), and a book on War Cinema (under contract with Rutgers). Zoe Detsi-Diamanti is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Literature and Culture at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She has been teaching and researching in the fields of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American culture and ideology, American drama and politics, and popular culture. Her publications include articles in American Drama, American Studies, New England Theater Journal, Prospects, as well as a book on Early American Women Dramatists, 1775–1860 (New York: Garland, 1998). Christina Dokou is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. She holds an M.A. and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Pennsylvania State University, with a specialty on myth in modern literature and gender studies. She has published a number of articles in journals and anthologies in Greece and abroad. Ekaterini Douka-Kabitoglou is Emeritus Professor of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and former Vice Rector. She taught English and Comparative Literature at the English Department of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and has written extensively on topics related to English and American poetry, Greek literature, philosophy, critical theory, Romantic studies, women poets, feminist criticism, and academic politics. Her publications include the books Plato and the English Romantics: dιalogoι (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); Fantasies of the Feminine: From Sappho to Derrida (Thessaloniki: Paratiritis, 2003 [in Greek]); Female Fiction: Women Poets of the 20th Century (Athens: Papazissis, 2007 [in Greek]); Georgos Heimonas’ Hamlet: Reviving the Gloomy Renaissance (Thessaloniki: Epikentro, 2008 [in Greek]). Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou is Assistant Professor in English Literature and Culture in the School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has been teaching and publishing on Realism, Modernism, and the English novel, as well as on feminist and body theory. Her book Feminist Readings of the Body in Virginia Woolf’s Novels was published in Thessaloniki in 1997. She has contributed to the Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe in the volumes on Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen and has coedited a special journal issue, “Wrestling Bodies” (Gramma 11, 2003), and a collection of essays: The Flesh Made Text Made Flesh: Cultural and Theoretical Returns to the Body, published by Peter Lang, New York (2007). Her current research interests focus on Enlightenment and Victorian sexualities. Katve-Kaisa Kontturi is a lecturer in Art History at the University of Turku, Finland. She specializes in questions of feminist art and art theory. She is the author of a monograph on Finnish Feminist Art (2006) as well as the


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coeditor of a methodological essay collection on participatory art research (2005), both in Finnish. Kontturi has worked as a visiting scholar at the University of Sydney and at UC Berkeley. Currently she is completing her PhD thesis on materiality of art and corporeal feminism. Thomas Laqueur is Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at UC Berkeley. He studies the cultural history of Europe during the past three centuries and has written on the history of sexuality, of death and commemoration, of religion, and of human rights and humanitarianism. The essay in this volume will form part of a new, soon to be finished book called “The Work of the Dead.” Laqueur is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, The Threepenny Review, Slate, The Nation, and other journals. When finished with the dead he hopes to write a book about dogs in western art. Cindy L. Linden is an Assistant Professor of English at Syracuse University where she teaches twentieth-century American literature and culture. Her current work (manuscript in progress) explores late twentieth-century clinical, critical, and cultural representations of pain in the United States, and she is completing an essay on healing and medicine in Louise Erdrich’s novels Tracks and Love Medicine. Domna Pastourmatzi is an associate professor and currently the chair of the Department of American Literature and Culture at the School of English, Aristotle University, Greece. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in American literature, African American Culture, Feminist Theory and Criticism, and Science Fiction. Her research interests focus on the politics and interrelations of technology, culture, and literature. Her recent book is titled Biotechnological and Medical Themes in Science Fiction. Savas Patsalidis is Professor of Theater History and Theory in the School of English, Aristotle University, Greece. He is the author of six books on theater and coeditor of another seven. He is currently completing a two-volume history of American Theater to be published by University Studio Press in 2009. He is also the theater reviewer of two monthly Greek literary journals. Nicola Rehling received her PhD from Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece, where she currently teaches courses on literature and film. She also works as a part-time lecturer in film studies at City College (Affiliated Institution of the University of Sheffield), Thessaloniki, Greece. Her publications include articles on contemporary cinema and literature, as well as her book entitled Extra-Ordinary Men: White Heterosexual Masculinity in Contemporary Popular Cinema (Lexington Books, forthcoming). Her research interests include feminist theory, feminist film theory, critical race theory, representations of gender and race in popular culture, the horror film, and the contemporary epic movie. Linda Williams is Associate Professor in Cultural History and Theory at RMIT University, where she also leads a research cluster on art and sustainability. Along with her work as a widely published art critic, her recent

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research and publications have focused on human–animal relations within the transdisciplinary contexts of the histories and philosophies of culture and science. Effie Yiannopoulou is Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Theory at Aristotle University, Thessaloniki. Her publications are in the field of twentieth-century women’s writings and have appeared in book collections and international journals. She has coedited Metaphoricity and the Politics of Mobility (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), The Flesh Made Text Made Flesh: Cultural and Theoretical Returns to the Body (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), and special issues for The European Journal of English Studies and Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism. She is currently researching the idea of Europe in the works of Rebecca West.

I n de x

aesthetics, 87 the “aesthetics of care,” 170 of the cemetery, 55 cyborg posthuman aesthetics, 11, 155, 156, 158 and disease language, 87–8 of embodiment, 23 and ethics, 87, 88, 89, 155 negative aesthetics and the dislocation of the classical body form, 146, 147 romantic aesthetics, 53 affects, 244, 245, 246, 251, 257, 259 and affirmative ethics, 257 and memory, 247 power of, 245 and process of becoming, 244, 254 see also nomadism, subjectivity Agamben, Giorgio, 4, 43 Alien, 191–2 American Psycho, 13 anatomy, 229, 230, 231, 232 comparative, 12, 228, 233 Galen, 237 (n16) Gunther von Hagens’s plastination, 214–15 (n2) see also Enlightenment, Harvey, rationalism, Vesalius animals, 170, 173, 227, 229, 234 becoming-animal, 170, 249, 252 and Cartesianism, 81, 184, 233, 235 animal as machine, 237 (n4); mute animality, 222, 227–8, 235, 236 erasure of animal sentience, 227, 228, 232, 233, 237 (n4) difference from the human subject, 156, 173, 175, 222, 223, 226, 227, 228, 232, 233, 234, 235

in early modernity, 222, 229–36 engineered, 156, 163–6, 170, 173, 176 (n53) as the non-human, 226, 236 as scientific research objects, 164, 227, 228, 229, 230–2 and theology, 175 (39n), 222, 230, 231, 235, 236 (n3) unchanged ontological status of (in postmodernity), 224, 235–6 see also Enlightenment, rational instrumentalism under rationalism, zoe anthropocentrism, 245, 254 anthropomorphism, 22, 29 archetypes, 133, 136, 137 Ariès, Philippe, 43 see also death artistic representations of the body digital A-life art, 162–3 feminist art, 106, 116, 117, 120, 121, 122 photography, 7–8, 11, 102–13, 115–21, 125–7, 129 (n38), 156, 215 (n4) transgenic art, 164, 165 see also bio-art, pin-ups Auerbach, Erich, 34 (n6), 146 Ballard, J. G Atrocity Exhibition, 101 “Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty,” 101 Balsamo, Anne, 182, 183, 192 Barthes, Roland, 101, 105, 106 Baudrillard, Jean, 185, 211, 212 on America, 135, 137, 141, 148, 150 (n71)

268

I n de x

becoming process of, 2, 124, 127, 128 (n11), 244, 246, 253, 254, 257, 258, 259 see also nomadism, transformation Bergson, Henri, 147, 246 Bernadino, Ramazzini, 52 Bernhard, Bruno, 103, 104 see also pin-ups bio-art, 155, 158–9, 162, 163–73 see also Eduardo Kac, The Tissue Culture and Art Project under Zurr, Ionat and Oron Catts biological determinism, 3, 5 biotechnologies, 11, 155, 156, 158, 159, 166, 213 nanotechnology, 204, 207 tissue culture engineering, 168 utopian vision of, 145 see also bio-art, ethics body androgynous, 31, 83, 121 Apollonian wholeness of, 30, 72 athletic, 26–9, 33, 92, 143, 184 as biological hardware, 200 cloned, 201, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 214 as code, 201 colonized, 64, 68, 251 commodification of, 12, 103, 201, 211, 237 (n7) contaminating, 8, 144, 171, 191, 206, 209, 213, 249–50, 253 decaying bodies, 2, 7, 8, 48, 52, 68–9, 107, 166 digitalization of, 200 dismemberment of, 19, 24–6, 32, 88 in distress, 19, 24, 25, 30 divine, 8, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 29–31, 35 (n12), 123, 222, 252 fetus-like, 191 hybrid, 7, 10, 12, 67, 69–70, 155–73, 176 (n53), 181, 188, 249 and informational theory, 202 loss of, 173 materiality of, 2, 4–5, 7, 33, 64, 67, 68–8, 74 (n36), 127 (n8), 128 (n9), 163, 182, 183, 185, 186, 190–1, 201, 206, 209, 211, 213, 222, 226, 227, 229, 230–1, 235–6, 242–3, 248, 251–4, 256

mutilated, 2, 6, 19, 25, 26, 30, 95 (n34), 109–10, 111–13 in popular culture, 10, 91, 199 redemption of, 4, 34, 38 (n54), 211 regression of, 31, 141 sensuous, 9, 24, 25, 33 and technoscience, 11, 12, 139, 200, 203, 207, 212, 213, 214, 216 transgressive potential of, 12, 105, 146, 247 see also mind vs. body body politic, 3, 25, 66, 233 Bonica, John J., 84, 90 and reconceptualization of pain, 85 Bordo, Susan, 116, 130 Boswell, James, 44–5, 55 Braidotti, Rosi, 6, 13, 128 (n11), 135, 141, 183, 192 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 6, 10, 67, 74, 122, 127 (n9), 128 Brooks, Peter, 34, 36 (n20) Butler, Judith, 2, 102, 175 (n78), 189, 194 (n39, n45) cannibalism, 26 Chicago, Judy, 121, 129 Christianity, 125, 165, 174, 175, 231, 235, 256 and Cartesianism, 182, 184, 191, 193 and disembodiment, 12, 189, 193 (n27) and dualism of body and soul, 174, 184, 222, 236 (n3) lack of (in classical Greece), 22; first appearance of, 28; in Plato, 23 and Gospel of John, 4 and Gospel of Paul, 4 and iconography, 125, 184 and mortality, 51, 222 somatophobia of, 184 and whiteness, 184 The Matrix, 187–90 see also Enlightenment, whiteness chronic pain as distinct from acute pain, 81, 87 as postmodern evil, 81, 90 and United States national consciousness, 79 chronic pain patients feminization of, 81, 85, 86 racialization of, 81, 85, 86

I n de x Cixous, Hélène, 140 classical body form, 135, 146 deconstruction of, 145, 146, 147 in Greek tragedy, 31–3, 33–4 Homeric epic, 20–2, 33 hyperbolic depiction of, 136 Pindaric lyric, 28–9, 33 Sapphic, 23–6, 33 see also athletic under body, superheroes, negative aesthetics comics, 11, 136, 140 and American popular culture, 133–4 “comic-book physics,” 138 as feminine genre, 142 and teenage readers, 143 transformative potential of, 133, 134, 145 see also classical body form, The Fantastic Four, grotesqueness, superheroes Copycat, 183 Corbin, Alain, 51 cosmetic surgery, 5, 101, 110, 124, 206–7 crossdressing, 32 cyborg, 181, 189 and body improvement, 139 sympathetic view of animal sentience, 223, 232, 235, 237 (n4) see also animals death anti-metaphysical death, 45 ars moriendi, 56 bones, 21, 44, 47, 50, 69, 83, 115, 205 corpse, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 19, 20–1, 29, 49–51, 64, 67, 105, 108, 210, 215 (n2, n4), 229, 230, 231 epic, 20, 22 figural death, 107, 109 pluralism of death, 9, 43, 46–8, 56 reincarnation, 46 “the ritual killing” of semi-living creatures, 170–1 thanatos, 67 see also zoe Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 13 (n2), 127, 128 (n11), 170, 244, 245, 246, 253, 257, 258 Derrida, Jacques, 43, 69, 144, 151 (n101)

269

Descartes, Réné, 3, 182, 184, 185–7, 191, 201, 215 (n16), 228, 235, 237 (n4) see also Enlightenment, mind vs. body Dionysian passion, 30–1, 71, 72 maenadic women, 31 disembodiment Christian, 12 postmodern, 183 in technology, 244 virtual, 5, 12, 181–2, 192, 203 white male, 184–93 Doane, Mary Anne, 181 Dyer, Richard, 184, 190, 193 (n27), 194 (n50) Eco, Umberto, 134, 137, 143, 144 on the myth of the Superman, 136 emergence definition of, 159, 160 see also cyborg, digital A-life under life, posthumanism, technology Enlightenment, 3, 224 and death, 4, 9, 49, 51, 52, 53 and elimination of the body, 183, 215 (n4) and the human subject, 223, 235 see also flesh, mind vs. body ethics, 34, 87, 89, 163, 166, 170–1, 185 and art, 158, 170 bioethics, 164, 165–6, 171, 173, 253 feminist, 255 legal ethics, 92 and nomadism, 256, 257 posthuman ethics, 158 Spinoza’s concept of, 245–6 see also affects, aesthetics Euripides Alcestis, 67 Bacchae, 30–3 eXistenZ, 192, 195, 198 The Fantastic Four, 134, 135, 136, 146 and deconstruction of heroism, science and family values, 144 the Human Torch, 138, 141–2 the Invisible Woman, 139–41 Mr. Fantastic, 137–9 the Thing, 142–3

270

I n de x

feminism, 122, 242 cyberfeminism, 192 and philosophy, 184 and politics, 258 see also artistic representations, ethics, gaze female body, 248, 249 and electronic technology, 183, 191 in a state of becoming, 116, 120, 124, 126 and psychoanalysis, 247 see also classical body form, gender, illness, sexuality flesh aversion to, 4, 183 expendability of, 4–5, 184, 189, 201, 227 and transformation of flesh, 120, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128, 133, 144, 160, 162, 242, 244, 245, 250, 256 future of, 4, 7, 8, 34, 171, 224 materiality of, 222, 227, 235, 244, 251 mortality of, 52, 222, 235 non-organic, 172–3 Orientalized, 2 plasticity of, 4 racialized, 2, 86, 87 radical alterity of, 7 tortured, 2, 8, 30, 229 as toute autre, 7 Foucault, Michel, 39 (n57), 43, 87, 145, 146, 158, 229 Freud, Sigmund, 35, 103, 104, 134, 192 Frye, Northrop, 146 gaze, 103, 140, 236 feminist visual theory, 117 masculine, 106, 117, 120, 185 medical, 118, 120, 123 transformative, 117, 118, 120, 121, 126 gender, 182 becoming-woman, 258, 259 black femininity, 190 instability of, 189 performativity of, 73, 183, 189 postgendered bodies, 181 the repressed feminine, 191, 192 virtual femininity, 242, 259

woman as “unrepresentable,” 139, 140, 141 see also crossdressing, sexuality Gibson, William Neuromancer, 183 Giotto Justicia, 125, 129 (n46) Grosz, Elizabeth, 2, 7, 8, 13 (n2), 128 (n11), 144 grotesqueness, 11, 134, 138, 145, 167 definition of, 135 escape from conformity, 147 ideal grotesqueness, 136 see also classical body form Haraway, Donna, 160, 181, 202, 203, 206, 210, 211, 212, 213, 225, 237, 250 The Cyborg Manifesto, 226–7 Onco Mouse, 170 Harvey, William, 229, 233 Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, 233–5 see also anatomy Hayles, Katherine N., 14, 161, 174 (n6), 202, 225 Heidegger, Martin, 38 (n57), 39 (n58), 43 on technology, 139 Heraclitus, 37 (n40) Homer demas, 20 and the male body, 2, 8–9, 19–22, 25, 28, 29, 33 Iliad, 19–22 psyche, 9, 20, 28, 29, 33, 37 (n38, n40), 81, 116, 137, 141, 206, 208, 247 soma, 9, 20, 29, 33 Human Genome Project, 167, 200 Hume, David, 43–7, 56 hyperembodiment, 187 see also superheroes identity politics, 182 illness cancerous body, 2, 7, 11, 47, 105, 107, 115–27, 170, 176 (n54), 246, 252

I n de x scars, 11, 34–5 (n6), 106–7, 110, 121, 122, 124, 146–7 see also chronic pain patients Irigaray, Luce, 13, 38 (n57), 39, 192 Jesurun, John Deep Sleep, 63 Philoktetes, 63–73 White Water, 62, 63 Johnson, Ben, 44–5 Jung, Carl Gustav, 133, 136, 137, 140, 141–2, 143 see also archetypes Kac, Eduardo, 11, 164–5, 175 see also bio-art, The Tissue Culture and Art Project under Zurr, Ionat and Oron Catts Kristeva, Julia, 13 (n2), 39 (n57), 143, 195 (n54) body as site of the abject, 70 Lacan, Jacques, 25, 32, 39 (n57), 139, 140, 143, 247–8, 255 “langscape” and Stein’s work, 61–2, 65 Laqueur, Thomas, 35 (n12), 37 (n44) one-sex aesthetic model, 26 The Lawnmower Man, 188, 194 Lefebvre, Henri, 6 life artificial life, 155, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163 digital A-life, 156, 158, 159–62, 163 new life forms, 159, 169–70 semi-living creatures, 156, 165, 166, 170, 171, 172 see also bio-art, posthumanism, zoe Linnaeus, Carl, 175 Lord Kames, 44, 48, 53, 55 Lyotard, Jean-François, 223, 224, 249 machinic assemblages, 244 Martineau, Harriet, 55 masculinity, 183, 186 disembodied, 182, 189 hypermasculinity, 181 hypernormative, 182 North American, 182 Virtual, 189

271

white heterosexual, 182, 183 see also athletic under body, postmodernism, superheroes The Matrix, 12, 181, 182, 185, 187–93, 195 (n55) The Matrix Revolutions, 188, 190 Matuschka, 122, 129 (n35) McCormack, Jon, 156, 158, 162 Turbulence: an interactive museum of unnatural history, 158 medical discourses biomedicine, 200, 216 Galenic medicine, 3, 230–1, 234 Hippocratic medicine, 3 modern medicine, 2, 46, 48, 56, 79 see also anatomy, Harvey, Vesalius Merleau-Ponty, 35 (n7), 38 (n56, n57), 39 (n58) metaphysics, 38, 45, 56, 226 ancient Greek, 22, 36 (n37), 184 of presence, 236 sedentarist and nomadic, 6, 14 (n17) of speed, 150 Western, 29 mind asomatic spirit, 202, 208 as collection of data, 205 mind vs. body, 3, 6, 38 (n57), 81, 161, 184–5, 235 see also Descartes, Enlightenment, Plato modernity, 6, 12, 236, 248, 253 critique of, 10, 221–36 death in, 9, 43, 48 early, 222, 224, 235, 229 unfinished project of, 221, 223, 224 monstrosity, 10, 105, 109, 110, 135, 141, 249, 253 of female flesh, 192 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 143–4 see also grotesqueness Morris, David The Culture of Pain, 90 Müller, Heiner Philoktetes, 63, 74 Munch Edward The Scream, 120–1, 128 (n29)

272

I n de x

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 34, 38 (n57), 39 (n58), 65, 75 (n66), 79, 88, 148 (n4) nomadism, 242, 245, 247, 253, 254, 257–8 and politics, 259 see also subjectivity, zoe Orlan, 123–4, 156 Palahniuk, Chuck Invisible Monsters, 102, 109–13 performance and body in pain, 64, 66, 69, 71, 72 phenomenology, 34, 38 Piccinini, Patricia, 156–7, 173 Pindar, 9, 23, 26–9, 33 kalokagathia, 26 Pinter, Harold, 1, 2, 8 pin-ups and corporeal immutability, 103, 104 deconstruction of, 104–9 as morale-builders, 103 as Playboy centerfolds, 103 Plato, 3, 28, 36–7 (n37), 143, 148 (n4), 184, 202, 233, 235, 236 (n3) Dialogues, 23 and lack of reason in animals, 184 Plotinus, 37 (n37) posthumanism, 7, 169, 221, 224, 225–6 and embodiment, 252, 256 see also ethics postmodernism, 7, 95, 181 see also disembodiment postmodernity, 223, 224, 250, 256 critique of, 109, 224 as not past modernity, 225, 235 racial difference, 182, 186, 187, 192 see also whiteness, flesh rationalism logos, 4, 9, 25, 140, 213, 252 rational instrumentalism, 222, 223, 228, 229 see also Enlightenment, zoe Rembrandt van Rijn Bathing Bathsheba, 118

Sappho, 9, 23–6, 33, 35 (n16, n17), 36 (n20, n22) Scarry, Elaine, 88, 89, 103 Second-World-War veterans as depraved, 89 as deviant, 90 feminized, 83–4 as “Other,” 82–3 sexuality, 31, 35 (n16), 36 (n20), 101, 206, 209–10, 243 autoeroticism, 23 bisexuality, 31–2 erotic female body, 23–5 female, 102, 104, 124, 125, 129 (n43), 144, 248 homosexuality, 36 (n24), 110, 209 metrosexual, 138 of monstrous body, 141, 143 and technology, 248–9 transsexual, 109, 249 white heterosexual male, 182, 184, 187, 190–1, 193, 218 (n107), 251 Sherman, Cindy Centerfolds-Series, 108 Untitled Film Stills, 107 Smith, Adam, 45–6 somatophobia, 184 Sophocles Philoktetes, 9, 10, 63, 65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77 Spence, Jo, 115, 118, 120, 121, 127 (n3) Stelarc, 156, 158, 167–8, 171, 173 (n2), 174 (n7) Exoskeleton, 157, 173 Extra Ear: Ear on Arm, 171, 172 Extra Ear-1/4 Scale, 167, 168, 170, 176 Stoker, Bram Dracula, 188 Strange Days, 12, 185–7, 189, 193 subjectivity, 9, 12 in ancient Greek lyric poetry, 23–4, 25, 33, 35 (n16) as becoming, 244, 258, 259 embodied, 243, 251 ethical, 254 nomadic, 64, 73 (n15), 242, 245, 251, 252, 256

I n de x postgendered, 181 postmodern, 183, 185, 188, 191, 201, 202, 204, 221, 224, 250 viral, 252 superheroes, 133, 136–7, 138, 146 deconstruction of, 144–5, 146 parody of, 141 see also hyperembodiment technology, 243, 244, 249, 250, 253 digital technologies, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 173, 174(n4), 189, 235, 248 feminization of, 192 and regression of the human body, 143 techno-bodies, 248 technophilia, 201 teleportation, 203, 205, 216 (n40) virtual reality, 182, 183, 186 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 181 transformation body change, 6–8 fluidity of, 3, 72, 159, 181 see also becoming, emergence, nomadic metaphysics under metaphysics Vesalius, Andreas, 234, 237 (n16) On the Fabric of the Human Body, 229–32 see also anatomy Vicq d’Azyr, 53 Virilio, Paul, 174 (n6) on transgenic art, 165

273

Visible Human Project, 200, 215 (n4), 219 Wellman, Mac The Land of Fog and Whistles, 64 West, Mae and fetishized female body, 102 and popular consciousness, 101 see also pin-ups whiteness, 187 association with Christianity, 184, 188, 190 whiteness scholarship, 194–5 (n50) see also Christianity, masculinity Wilke, Hannah Hannah Wilke Super-T-Art, 105 Intra-Venus, 107 S.O.S Starification Object Series, 106, 107 Yalom, Marilyn History of the Breast, 124 Žižek, Slavoj, 183 zoe vs bio, 4, 37 (n38), 251, 252 see also animals, subjectivity (nomadic) Zurr, Ionat and Oron Catts, 158 and SymbioticA, 166, 175 (n43) and Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A), 11, 158, 166–8, 170, 171, 175 (n43, n46) and Worry Dolls, 167, 169, 175 see also bio-art, Eduardo Kac, Stelarc

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