by Mark Dery
BODY POLITIC
Obsolete Bodies and
Posthuman Beings1
Biomechanical tattoos. © 1995 B.J. Papas. Model: Rick Healey.
Tattoo by Andrea Elston.
I Have Seen the Future, and It is Morphed
My intention is to tell of bodies changed to different forms.
–Ovid2
Morphing is the computer animation technique that gave Terminator 2 much of its technodazzle, enabling the T-1000 killer android to dissolve seamlessly from a slight, feline policeman into the sinewy heroine Sarah Connor, a paunchy hospital guard, or even checkerboard linoleum. The effect has become ubiquitous: A Schick TV spot features average Joes who dissolve, one into another, while shaving, and an ad for the exercise guru Richard Simmons’s Deal-a-Meal weight loss program incorporates former fatties who melt down to their current svelte selves before our very eyes. Anything that can be converted into ones and zeroes in computer memory can be morphed; morphing liquefies the human form, dissolves it into a running, flowing anima able to pour itself into any vessel.
The term borging derives from cyborg, coined in 1960 by research space scientist Manfred Clynes. (Appropriately, Clynes’s term is itself a sort of linguistic cyborg, a combination of cybernetic and organism.) For Clynes, advances in biomedical engineering-rechargeable pacemakers, synthetic knee and hip joints-dramatized the permeability of the membrane separating organism and mechanism. “As each of these mechanical devices becomes a functioning part of a human,” notes the historian David F. Channell,
it becomes more and more difficult to characterize the assimilated object as a human or as a machine. . . . The cyborg is not any ordinary combination of a human and a machine, such as a human using a tool; rather the cyborg involves a unique relationship between the human and the machine in that the machine “needs to function without the benefit of consciousness, in order to cooperate with the body’s own autonomous homeostat-ic controls.”3
Thus, Hollywood morphing and borging have real-world analogs. Genetic engineering, wherein DNA sequences from one organism are introduced into another to produce “transgenic” plants and animals, is a sort of morphing. The virus-resistant mouse created at Ohio University in 1992 by injecting a human gene that promotes interferon production into a fertilized mouse embryo is a morph. So is the genetically altered pig created in 1991 at the Princeton-based DNX Corporation by injecting clones of human DNA into fertilized swine eggs, yielding a pig that produced human hemoglobin.
Many fear (and a radical few hope) that transgenic animals are merely a prelude to genetically engineered superhumans. “We are now able to transcend the limitations of particular species and combine the virtues (and vices) of different species and indeed program into species . . . attributes never before a feature of any species,” claims John Harris, in Wonder-woman and Superman: The Ethics of Human Biotechnology. “We can, or eventually will be able to, create new ‘transgenic’ creatures of unprecedented nature and qualities. It would not be an exaggeration to say that humanity now stands at a crossroads.”4
But morphs aren’t confined to high-tech labs; they’re all around us. The transsexual “Tula,” featured in a recent Playboy pictorial, is a self-assured morph who “needed my body changed to fit my self-image.”5 The products of cosmetic surgery who populate the tabloids-Roseanne, Ivana Trump, La Toya Jackson-are a sadder sort of morph, their idiosyncratic features defaced and refaced in the name of a generic standard of beauty. Cindy Jackson (no relation to La Toya), who has appeared on the Jenny Jones Show, has undergone more than twenty operations to make her resemble a Barbie doll (she doesn’t); another, more celebrated Jackson has reimagined himself as a gene splice of Diana Ross and Peter Pan.
Borgs, likewise, are not confined to sci-fi films. In cyberculture, the body is a permeable membrane, its integrity violated and its sanctity challenged by titanium alloy knee joints, myoelectric arms, synthetic bones and blood vessels, breast and penile prostheses, cochlear implants, and artificial hips. The Utah arm, the Boston elbow, and the Otto Bock hand-lifelike prostheses activated by electrical current in the form of electromyographic (EMG) signals coming from an amputee’s stump and surrounding muscles-have attained mythic status in modern medicine. “By the turn of the century, every major organ except the brain and the central nervous system will have [an] artificial replacement,” says Dr. William Dobelle, an authority on bionics.6 Pacemakers and other bionic devices for ailing, usually aged hearts are already commonplace, and researchers are at work on an implantable electric heart.
“Today’s old are already in one technological vanguard,” asserts the cultural critic Thomas Hine. “They have been quite willing to accept artificial devices into their bodies to replace parts that are worn out. . . . Cyborgs . . . are an old staple of science fiction, but nobody ever predicted that Grandma would turn into one.”7 Soon, Grandma may have company in the posthuman vanguard: The futurologist Alvin Toffler believes that miniaturized computers “will not only be implanted [in our bodies] to compensate for some physical defect but eventually will be implanted to enhance human capability. The line between human and computer at some point will become completely blurred.”8
Technology calls into question time-honored ideas about the body. We live in an age of engineered monsters, when the human form seems increasingly indeterminate-reducible to replaceable parts, like the Schwarzenegger T-800 cyborg in Terminator 2, or infinitely manipulable, like T2’s liquid metal T-1000.
Furthermore, the body is being transformed from a fortress of solitude into a combat zone for ideological skirmishes over abortion rights, fetal tissue use, AIDS treatment, assisted suicide, euthanasia, surrogate mothering, genetic engineering, cloning, even state-sponsored cosmetic surgery for prison inmates, “YOUR BODY IS A BATTLEGROUND,” proclaims a poster by the artist Barbara Kruger.
In the last years of the twentieth century, we bear witness to the triumph of a mechanistic view of the body rooted in Cartesian dualism, which divides reality into immaterial mind and an inert, material world (in which category Descartes included the human body) wholly explicable in mechanical terms. The rhetoric of artificial intelligence theorists such as Marvin Minsky, to whom the brain is a “meat machine,” has trickled down into newspaper science pages in the form of the durable brain-as-computer metaphor.
New Age cyberculture, corporate motivational seminars, and nineties upgrades of the human potential movement of the seventies often incorporate therapeutic techniques that conceive of the mind as a “biocom-puter,” capable of being reprogrammed with the right commands. For example, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)–the brainchild of a linguist and a computer programmer-employs a process called “modeling,” based on the theory that success-oriented behavioral patterns can be “installed” in the subconscious, through self-hypnosis, in much the same way that programs are installed in a computer. “Each of us has at [his] disposal the most incredible computer on the planet, but unfortunately no one gave us an owner’s manual,” writes the motivational psychology guru Anthony Rob-bins, whose system of Neuro-Associative Conditioning descends from NLP.9 Robbins’s “technology” uses NLPlike techniques to reroute self-defeating neural connections, “rewiring yourself to feel and behave consistent with your new, empowering choices.”10
The neo-Cartesian reduction of the body to a machine is concomitant with its redefinition as a commodity. Andrew Kimbrell, the policy director for the Foundation on Economic Trends, contends that the logic of the market economy, which forever altered the landscape of Western culture by treating “human work, formerly simply a part of daily life, as a commodity,” achieves its ultimate expression in the commodification of the human body.11 He writes,
More and more, Americans are selling their very selves: their blood, semen, ova, even their newborns. And, more and more, researchers and corporations are marketing human “products” including organs, fetus parts, tissues, cell lines, bio-chemicals, and genes. . . . The escalating price placed on
our most intimate possessions has created a boom market in the human body.12
But one country’s boom is another’s bust. An unsettling Arizona Republic article about a global black market in body parts spurred by a “growing demand for organs for transplants and use in medical research and cosmetics” documents, in grisly detail, the chasm between the so-called First and Third Worlds.13 The story tells of an illicit Russian operation trading in kidneys, hearts, lungs, livers, eyes, and “3,000 pairs of testicles, which are used for rejuvenating creams”; of corneas extracted with coffee spoons from mental patients in Argentina; of children vanishing without a trace in Honduras-kidnapped, it is believed, by organ traffickers.14
Disparate forces threaten, literally as well as figuratively, to draw and quarter our bodies, our selves: high-tech prosthetics, genetic engineering, plastic surgery, gender reassignment, the public debate over body politics, and the redefinition of the body as a warm-blooded machine or a potentially lucrative source of spare parts. We don’t know what to make of ourselves precisely because we are, more than ever before, able to remake ourselves-a conundrum reflected in the cognitive dissonance of our mass media, where images of the body as a temple in ads for Evian bottled water and Calvin Klein’s Obsession perfume collide with images of that temple desecrated in splatter movies and Stephen King novels.
Our media tells us that we are a culture that worships the gym-toned body, and we are inclined to agree: hunks and supermodels are the objects of our desire. Then again, our movie screens inundate us with images of the body dissected or dissolved: Horror film rejoices in exploding heads, spilling guts, squelching eyeballs, gouts of vomit. Of course, horror has always taken the body as its central trope, but tales of corpse grinders, brain eaters, and body snatchers seem uniquely relevant to the end of the twentieth century, a period whose obsession with the body belies a widespread anxiety over the body’s fate. Repressed, body anxiety seeks release elsewhere, erupting with a vengeance in horror film and fiction. “[I]f offerings like American Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs have anything to tell us about ourselves,” notes Barbara Ehrenreich, “it must be that at this particular historical moment, we have come to hate the body.”15 The body, she reasons, has “let us down”: Sex, chief among our earthly delights, “turned out to spread deadly viruses.”16
To be sure, the body horror we see all around us is most obviously a waking dream about the AIDS pandemic, whose ravages have imprinted nightmare images on the mass imagination–bodies gnawed to skin and bones, flesh mottled by the purple lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma. But body horror also coincides with the cultural post-traumatic stress syndrome induced by the relocation, in technology, of an ever greater number of our cognitive and muscular operations. It bears out Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that the cultural trauma caused by the technological “autoamputation” of human functions is a salient feature of the information age. “Does the body still exist at all, in any but the most mundane sense?” asks J. G. Ballard. “Its role has been steadily diminished, so that it seems little more than a ghostly shadow seen on the X-ray plate of our moral disapproval.”17 The essayist Linda Hasselstrom ponders the body’s atrophy:
We take a body with [a] hunter/fighter history, prop it upright for eight hours while the fingers lightly punch buttons, then seat it in a car where moderate foot pressure and a few arm movements take it home. Once it’s home it slumps down on a cushiony surface and aims its eyes at a lighted screen for two to six hours, then lies down on another soft surface until it’s time to get up and do it all again. No wonder we’re sick.18
The divorce between our minds and our bodies becomes dramatically apparent after longtime immersion in a simulated world (TV viewing, PC gaming, Internet surfing, computer hacking, arcade virtual reality): surfacing is marked by a few seconds’ worth of decompression-a momentary reincorporation of the wandering mind into the vacant body. Bruce Sterling captures this moment in “Spider Rose,” a short story about a spacebound cyborg, scanning the heavens with eight telescopes “fed into her brain through a nerve-crystal junction at the base of her skull.”19 Gazing starward, “she knew nothing” of her body, “for she was elsewhere, watching for visitors.”20 In time, they come, rousing her to action: “Spider Rose came partially out of her static observation mode and felt herself in her body once more.”21
Discorporation of this sort is not uncommon in cyberculture, where growing numbers spend their days in “static observation mode,” scrolling through screenfuls of data. Bit by digital bit, we are becoming alienated from our increasingly irrelevant bodies, a sense of discorporation captured in the performance artist Laurie Anderson’s quip, “I am in my body the way most people drive their cars.”22 With this alienation comes a body loathing, a combination of mistrust and contempt for the cumbersome flesh that accounts for the drag coefficient in technological environments. “We are now entering a colonialist phase in our attitudes to the body, full of paternalistic notions that conceal a ruthless exploitation carried out for its own good,” declares Ballard. “Will the body at last rebel, tip all those vitamins, douches and aerobic schedules into Boston harbor and throw off the colonialist oppressor?”23
David Cronenberg, our foremost theoretician of viral sex and “uncontrollable flesh,” takes up Ballard’s thread. “I don’t think that the flesh is necessarily . . . evil,” says Cronenberg, “[but it] is cantankerous, and it is independent. . . . It really is like colonialism. The colonies suddenly decide that they can and they should exist with their own personality and should detach from the control of the mother country. . . . I think that the flesh in my films is like that.”24 In his movie The Brood (1979), patients at Dr. Raglan’s cultish Psychoplasmics Institute are taught to bring their neuroses and psychoses to the surface-literally, in the form of stigmata. The results are not always promising. A distraught graduate of the institute bares his chest to reveal grotesque tumors. “It’s a form of cancer of the lymphatic system,” he explains, through gritted teeth. “Raglan encouraged my body to revolt against me and it did. Now I have a small revolution on my hands and I’m not putting it down very successfully.”
The antipathy between mind and body is implicit in the metaphysical riddle at the heart of the human condition-that we simultaneously have bodies and are bodies, that our flesh is both “it” and “I.” Northrop Frye writes, “Human consciousness feels that it is inside a body it knows next to nothing about, even such elementary facts as the circulation of the blood being relatively recent discoveries. Hence it cannot feel that the body is identical with consciousness.”25
At the same time, the software of our minds is maddeningly dependent on the hardware that houses it, our bodies. Body loathing arises, in part, from the terrible unfairness of the body’s planned obsolescence. Says Cronenberg,
Many of the peaks of philosophical thought revolve around the impossible duality of mind and body. . . . The basis of horror-and difficulty in life in general-is that we cannot comprehend how we can die. Why should a healthy mind die, just because the body is not healthy? There seems to be something wrong with that.26
Sometimes, of course, body loathing simply speaks to the fact that the body can be, well, loathsome. “Who has not felt at times the ‘foulness’ of the body and the desire to shake it off?” asks Bruce Mazlish, a philosopher of science. “Has not felt revulsion at the ‘base’ necessity of bowel movements, or perhaps even of sex?”27
The Christian worldview that underwrites Western culture overlays this physical disgust with a moral revulsion. D. H. Lawrence, who believed that “the greatest, most deeply rooted enemy of sensual life is Christianity,” blamed St. Paul, taking the apostle to task for his “emphasis on the division of body and spirit, and his belief that the flesh is the source of corruption.”28
Yet, long-lived though it may be, body loathing rises to a crescendo in cyberculture, where these influences seem poised to sever mind from body, once and for all. “In the present condition we are uncomfortable halfbreeds
, part biology, part culture, with many of our biological traits out of step with the inventions of our minds,” asserts the artificial intelligence theorist Hans Moravec.29
Recent military accidents involving “friendly fire” provide sobering proof of Moravec’s claim. Computerized weapons technology demands human operators capable of processing information and making decisions at superhuman speeds, says Captain Phil Bozzelli, the commander of the USS Valley Forge. “We are putting a lot of pressure on decision makers, and those who support them, to be infallible,” he notes. “And the human body isn’t ready to be infallible.”30 In 1994, when American fighter planes shot down two U.S. Army helicopters over northern Iraq, killing all on board, the retired army lieutenant colonel Charles R. Shrader took up Bozzelli’s refrain: “Modern technology has simply evolved so fast and in so many different ways that it is overtaxing human capacities,” he told the New York Times.31
Meanwhile, on the philosophical battlefields of the academy, traditional perceptions of the body and the self are under attack by contemporary feminist theory. Because women have so often been reduced to objectified flesh throughout Western history, feminists have a vested interest in body politics. Since the early eighties, academic inquiries into the extent to which our knowledge of the body is culturally produced, rather than naturally determined, have proliferated, giving rise to a branch of scholarship that Judith Allen and Elizabeth Grosz call “corporeal feminism.”32
According to the feminist theorist Anne Balsamo, feminists attempting to grapple with “the cultural construction of the gendered body” in cyberculture have had to come to terms with science and technology in a way that their precursors did not:
An earlier feminist criticism that condemned science and technology as masculinist cults of rationality has given way to a serious engagement with a cluster of related questions that concern not only the development of new sciences and the deployment of new technologies (genetic engineering, for example), but also the philosophical frameworks that structure the social organization of the production of truth and knowledge.33
