Escape Velocity

by Mark Dery

  Contemplating the unlucky conjunction of technology and the female body in the information age, feminists as diverse as Naomi Wolf and Donna Haraway are challenging deep-seated ideas about the body in general and the female body in specific. Wolf, the best-selling advocate of a pro-capitalist “power feminism,” and Haraway, a socialist-feminist historian of science, are spearheading mainstream and academic critiques that shatter the image of the body in cyberculture.

  Build Me a Woman

  Some girls wander by mistake

  into the mess that scalpels make

  —Leonard Cohen34

  Time and again, patriarchal culture has brought technology to bear on women’s bodies in the service of male fantasies: The corset produced the heaving bosom of romance novels even as it hindered respiration, restricted mobility, and rearranged the internal organs; the bustle thrust the buttocks up and back, approximating “the posture of a female animal in heat.”35

  The remodeling of the female body in accordance with bourgeois ideals did not end with the passing of the corset and the bustle. The consumer culture of industrial modernity merely emphasized the economic subtext of such practices. In the 1920s, writes Stuart Ewen, advertising educated American women “to look at themselves as things to be created competitively against other women: painted and sculpted with the aids of the modern market.”36

  In The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women, Naomi Wolf indicts the unattainable ideal promulgated by the beauty industry-a pernicious fantasy that has made crash dieting, eating disorders, cosmetic surgery, and the onset of a chronic self-loathing rites of passage for too many American women. In cyberculture, notes Wolf, digital systems have enabled the creation of truly posthuman paragons of beauty: the impossibly flawless models in ads and fashion layouts in women’s magazines exist only as digitized photos, retouched with computer graphics software. “Airbrushing age from women’s faces is routine” even in general interest publications, she reports, and “computer imaging . . . has been used for years in women’s magazines’ beauty advertising” to remake reality to corporate dictates. This issue, she contends,

  is not trivial. It is about the most fundamental freedoms: the freedom to imagine one’s own future and to be proud of one’s own life. . . . to airbrush age off a woman’s face is to erase women’s identity, power, and history.37

  Inverting the relationship between replica and original, this unreality fosters a postmodern psychosis. “As frozen, photogenic images-in ads or style magazines-become models from which people design . . . themselves, extreme alienation sets in,” writes Ewen. “One becomes, by definition, increasingly uncomfortable in one’s own skin.”38

  The union of computer technologies with Wolfs beauty myth may one day spawn creatures not unlike Pris, the Pleasure Model android in the movie Blade Runner. Cosmetic surgeons have already begun using computer programs to create previews of postop results by manipulating a patient’s digitized photo. According to an article in the San Francisco Examiner, “The elusive ‘perfect face’ has been quantified and put into a computerized ‘facial template.’ By comparing a patient’s face with the template, doctors can determine which features need correction.”39

  The process inspired Brian D’Amato’s Beauty, a roman à clef about the messy collision of postmodernism, plastic surgery, and the beauty myth, set in the New York art world. In D’Amato’s novel, an artist’s obsession with Renaissance portraiture bears strange fruit: In an avant-garde surgical process, Jamie Angelo peels off his girlfriend’s face and replaces it with synthetic skin on which he sculpts a countenance worthy of a quattrocento beauty, based on a computer composite of the most exquisite features in art history. The plot takes a ghoulish turn when things begin to go horribly wrong with Angelo’s not-yet-ready-for-prime-time handiwork.

  “We’re closer to the era of total-reconstruction surgery than people think,” says D’Amato. “The same computer-imaging techniques described in Beauty are already in use in plastic surgery clinics all over the world. . . . When the type of surgery described in Beauty becomes available, there will be people out there who will want to push the edge of the envelope.”40

  In a poetic sense, vanguard artists are already applying postmodern quotation to human anatomy. The role of computer imaging in creating ideals of beauty, and in the surgical revision of living tissue in accordance with those ideals, is addressed in what the National Review art critic James Gardner calls the “Art of the Body,” a nineties redux of seventies body art. Riding the crest of this latest wave is the French performance artist Orlan.

  Nowhere do body politics, the avant-garde’s imperative to shock, and the pathologies of a culture drowning in images and obsessed with appearances come together more arrestingly, or disturbingly, than in Or-lan’s operating theater. Since 1990, she has undergone cosmetic surgery seven times as part of The Ultimate Masterpiece: The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, a “carnal art” work-in-progress designed to transform her face into a collage of famous features. Her surgeons’ hands are guided by a “facial template” assembled from digitized details of famous paintings. The composite face has Mona Lisa’s forehead; the eyes of Gerome’s Psyche; the nose of a Diana attributed to the School of Fontainebleau; the mouth of Boucher’s Europa; and the chin of Botticelli’s Venus.

  Each operation is a performance: The patient, surgeon, and attending personnel wear haute couture scrubs, designed in one instance by Paco Rabanne, and the operating room is decorated with crucifixes, plastic fruit, and outsized placards displaying the production’s “credits” in the kitschy style of fifties movie posters. Given only local anesthesia, Orlan acts less like a patient than a director on the set; during a 1993 operation in New York, she read from a book on psychoanalysis and interacted by phone or fax with viewers around the globe watching a live video transmission of the event via satellite. “I will stop my work when it is as close as possible to the computer composite,” she informed a New York Times reporter.41 Her self-objectification is instructive: By “it,” she means her body, which is synonymous in her case with “my work.”

  Whether Orlan’s surgical performances are carnal art or carnival art is a matter of debate. The critic and curator Barbara Rose contends that the artist is acting out “the madness of a demand for an unachievable physical perfection”; Gardner maintains that she is merely a particularly noxious example of “the French obsession with refinement and feminine beauty.”42 Orlan insists that she is a feminist; her art, she writes, “brings into question the standards of beauty imposed by our society . . . by using the process of plastic surgery to a different end than the usual patient does”—although how the rearrangement of her face in the image of an idealized Renaissance femininity constitutes such a critique is unclear.43 Her characterization of the experience of going under the knife as “cathartic” would not sound out of place on the lips of a plastic surgery addict.

  Then, too, there is the sticky business of her self-promotion: A seasoned mediamonger, she repeats surefire sound bites (“I HAVE GIVEN MY BODY FOR ART,” “THE BODY IS BUT A COSTUME”) and wraps gore, glamour, and the ever popular image of the eccentric artist in a mediagenic package. “I’m the artist who has gone the furthest,” she claims, in a press release. Like all great media manipulators, she blurs the line, à la Salvador Dali, between art and advertising, product and public image (the Times called her private life “a carefully constructed cipher”). She sometimes appears in photographs dressed as the baroque “St. Orlan,” a sobriquet reminiscent of the surrealist’s preferred title, “the Divine Dali,” and she out-Dalis Dali by literally becoming her own commodity: The fat removed during her operations is on sale in petri dishes dubbed “reliquaries.”

  In a written interview, Orlan sums up her philosophy in fractured English. “Orlan wants to fight against. . . the inborn, against DNA,” she writes. Religion and psychoanalysis maintain that “we must accept ourselves [as we are]. . . . But [in an age] of genetic manipulation, this
is a primitive outlook.”44

  In the final analysis, then, it is “primitive,” humanist notions of what is natural and what is unnatural that are Orlan’s true bete noire, not the sexist “standards of beauty imposed by our society.” Her professed feminism and her manifest posthumanism cancel each other out: Those who declare war on “what is natural” are in no position to bemoan the unnatural “standards of beauty imposed by our society”; if the body is simply so much RAM (random-access memory) waiting to be overwritten with new data, one cut is as good as another. Beneath her politically expedient rhetoric about the evils of the beauty myth, Orlan conceals a not so secret dream: to be the art world’s first posthuman celebrity. The artist, who has referred to herself as a “replicant” and who has observed, “I think the body is obsolete,” seems primed for a cyborgian makeover, a metamorphosis into something out of Naomi Wolfs worst nightmares.

  At the end of The Beauty Myth, Wolf warns that women are imperiled by their failure to understand that the Iron Maiden–the unnecessary fictions about the body beautiful that cage women’s lives-has finally been uncoupled from the human frame of reference. “We still believe that there is some point where [cosmetic] surgery is constrained by a natural limit, the outline of the ‘perfect’ human female,” she writes.

  That is no longer true. The “ideal” has never been about the bodies of women, and from now on technology can allow the “ideal” to do what it has always sought to do: leave the female body behind altogether to clone its mutations in space. The human female is no longer the point of reference. The “ideal” has become at last fully inhuman. . . . Fifty million Americans watch the Miss America pageant; in 1989 five contestants . . . were surgically reconstructed by a single Arkansas plastic surgeon. Women are comparing themselves and young men are comparing young women with a new breed that is a hybrid nonwoman.45

  In other words, a morph. Perhaps, Wolf speculates, such creatures are only intimations of silicone-and silicon-sylphs to come. If this sounds like alarmist nonsense, consider Cindy Jackson, the living Barbie mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Jackson has embarked on a crusade “which evolved while assisting other women through Barbie-izations” to create “a bionic army,” according to M. G. Lord.46 “In Barbie’s early years, Mattel struggled to make its doll look like a real-life movie star,” writes Lord.

  Today, however, real-life celebrities-as well as common folk-are emulating her. . . . [T]here are already a lot of bionic women out there. “I don’t even think I want to walk down the street in California,” Cindy told me. “They’ve all done what I’ve done. Over there I’m just another Barbie doll.”47

  Jackson, whose philosophy is founded on the principle that men “are really drawn to women for their looks,” earnestly believes that surgery has given her “the perfect face and body.”

  Wolf is troubled by the growing sophistication of computer-enhanced photography “that will make ‘perfection’ increasingly surreal,” and by menacing visions of “technologies that [will] replace the faulty, mortal female body, piece by piece, with the ‘perfect’ artifice.”48 Will this gyndroid have adjustable implants, Wolf wonders, that will allow her to instantaneously accommodate each partner’s preference in breasts? In a posthuman, postfeminist future where “no self-respecting woman will venture outdoors without a surgically unaltered face,” suggests Wolf, it will only be a matter of time before cosmetic surgeons “reposition the clitoris, sew up the vagina for a snugger fit, loosen the throat muscles, and sever the gag reflex. . . . The machine is at the door. Is she the future?”49

  The Promises of Monsters50

  It is a profound irony that a “hybrid nonwoman”—albeit one utterly unlike Wolfs–is the central conceit of an essay hailed as a benchmark in feminist thought: Donna Haraway’s enormously influential “A Cyborg Manifesto.”

  Haraway’s argument turns on a progressive, feminist reading of the myth of the cyborg-a myth that is traditionally interpreted as a macho, militarized response to forces that threaten accepted definitions of what it means to be male, even human. To Claudia Springer, a feminist critic of cyberculture, RoboCop and the Schwarzenegger Terminator express “nostalgia for a time when masculine superiority was taken for granted and an insecure man needed only to look at technology to find a metaphor for the power of phallic strength.”51

  In addition, Hollywood’s armored cyborgs, the remnants of their humanity impregnable behind heavy metal hardware, speak to a growing sense of human irrelevance in what is, more and more, a technological environment. The cultural critic Scott Bukatman sees, in RoboCop and the Terminator, “an uneasy but consistent sense of human obsolescence, and at stake is the very definition of the human. . . . [O]ur ontology is adrift.52

  To which Haraway replies, “The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.”53 Unlike RoboCop and other pugnacious symbols of an embattled status quo, Haraway’s cyborg is the personification of a future untroubled by ambiguity and difference. It reconciles mechanism and organism, culture and nature, Tomorrowland and Arcadia, simulacrum and original, science fiction and social reality in a single body. A Utopian monster, born of a “pleasure in . . . potent and taboo fusions” and “resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity,” Haraway’s cyborg is a living symbol of difference (sexual, ethnic, and otherwise) that refuses to be resolved or repressed.54

  When Haraway declares that we are all cyborgs, she means it both literally-medicine has given birth to “couplings between organism and machine,” bio- and communications technologies are “recrafting our bodies”—and figuratively, in the sense that “we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system.”55 In short, technology is reversing the polarities of the world we live in:

  Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally-designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.56

  In the eddies and vortices of these turbulent times, Haraway sees a historically unique opportunity for feminists to upset the balance of patriarchal power by “embracing the possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions” between the privileged term and its devalued opposite in the hierarchical dualisms “structuring the Western self.”57

  To Haraway, the breaching, by science and technology, of boundaries between previously inviolable domains lines up neatly with contemporary academic thought–specifically, with poststructuralism, a school of literary theory and cultural analysis founded in France in the late sixties. According to poststructuralists, Western systems of meaning are underwritten by binary oppositions: body/soul, other/self, matter/spirit, emotion/ reason, natural/artificial, and so forth. Meaning is generated through exclusion: The first term of each hierarchical dualism is subordinated to the second, privileged one. Poststructuralism attempts to expose the artful dodge whereby philosophical hierarchies validate their standards of truth by invalidating their opposites.

  To Haraway, cyberculture by its very nature challenges these dualisms. Technology’s trespasses across the once-forbidden zone between the natural and the artificial, the organic and the inorganic render much of what we know–or thought we knew–provisional. The philosophical implication of these and other technical developments, she argues, is that the conceptual cornerstones of the Western worldview-the network of meanings “structuring the Western self”–are fraught with cracks. Hammer blows in all the right places could bring the whole edifice tumbling down, she theorizes.

  But “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in addition to being an indictment of the Western worldview, is also an unflinching critique of feminism-specifically, of feminist attitudes toward science and technology. Previous feminisms have attempted to subvert the oppressive binary oppositions mentioned earlier by inverting them, redeeming the discarded first term of e
ach hierarchical dualism. Ecotopian feminism, New Age goddess feminism, and other strains of what Katha Pollitt has called “difference” feminism assert that emotion, nurturing, and other traits “inherent” in women, though culturally depreciated, are no less valid than the “male” attributes lauded by our society. Woman, here, is Mother Earth, tuned to the frequencies of nature (the body) rather than culture (the mind)-a creature of biology rather than technology, intuition rather than rationality.

  But, says Haraway, neither nature nor the body exist anymore, in the Enlightenment sense; both are irredeemably polluted, philosophically speaking, in an age of human babies with baboon hearts and genetically altered mice with human genes. The techno-logic of the late twentieth century, in concert with philosophies such as poststructuralism-which views nature, the body, and other previous givens as cultural constructions–“not only undermines the justifications for patriarchy but all claims for an organic or natural standpoint.”58 In other words, “It’s not just that ‘god’ is dead; so is the ‘goddess.’”59

  Furthermore, she argues, in light of “the situation of women in a world so intimately restructured through the social relations of science and technology,” feminism can ill afford “an anti-science metaphysics, a demon-ology of technology” that will condemn it to powerlessness.60 Ballard put it succinctly: “Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.”61

  New Age, pagan, or Gaian feminists who conduct their critique of the technological society in spiritual terms overlook the obvious, everyday ways in which cyberculture negatively affects women’s lives. What Haraway calls the “New Industrial Revolution” has exposed female laborers in the semiconductor industry and the women who assemble electronic components in their homes to toxic chemicals that cause chromosome damage, premature deliveries, and miscarriages. Moreover, as the Whole Earth Review writer Joan Howe notes, telecommuting, like many of this century’s labor-saving innovations for the housewife, is proving to be more curse than blessing; housebound mothers of young children who earn extra cash at the home terminal through “routine clerical work and production typing” are working