Escape Velocity

by Mark Dery

  [H]e was looking at Gina with what felt like a universe of knowledge within him, everything from every part of the system, databases that outlined every face of human behavior, delineated every emotion, defined every word by tone of human voice and told every story. . . . Joy surged into his configuration, to see so deeply into her, even though she was not on-line with him. . . . Moments later, he seemed to plummet, out of balance because she wasn’t there and there could be no reciprocation. The unfairness of it was truer pain than anything he’d ever felt incarnate.92

  Cadigan’s evocation of the loneliness of the discarnate mind is unbearably poignant. Virtual Mark is terribly, irrevocably alone in his virtual universe, the only human consciousness in a cosmos of information. The sensation of skin against skin is nothing but a memory, saved to disk. Mark can relive it through a surprisingly lifelike simulation, but he is haunted by the nagging truth that a digital re-creation will always be the next best thing to being there: “Now all he had to do was reach for it in his memory, and he was there again, in the pleasure. But in the loneliness, too.”93

  Visual Mark’s transcendental leap is diminished by its egocentrism; rather than dissolving his solipsistic self in a mystical Over-Soul, he has unleashed his all-consuming ego on the infinite (in this case, the System). “[H]is self was getting greater all the time, both ways, greater as in more wonderful and greater as in bigger,” he exults, early on.94 In time, however, a painful truth dawns: “Maybe you could make yourself bigger, but you couldn’t make yourself any less alone.”95 As Joseph Campbell once observed,

  [T]he whole aim is to go past. . . one’s concept of oneself, to that of which one is but an imperfect manifestation. . . . If you think, “I here, in my physical presence and in my temporal character, am God,” then you are mad and have short-circuited the experience. You are God, not in your ego, but in your deepest being, where you are at one with the nondual transcendent.96

  The System, like all computer-generated spaces, is the realm not of the numinous but of the human mind-specifically, memory-metastasized; to become one with such a construct is to disappear into an exteriorized model of one’s own cognitive machinery, to become Narcissus falling into his own reflection. The SF novelist and critic Norman Spinrad finds a moral in the book’s punning title:

  The personal sin [in Synners] is the abandonment of human love in favor of the ultimate solipsistic seduction of total immersion in a virtual reality of which the electronic machineries make you the god. . . . In the end, the sin is not that of electronic transcendence but of abandoning human empathy and feeling in the obsessive pursuit of same.97

  Anne Balsamo reminds us that the transcendental world of cyberspace is one half of a duality whose repressed other half is the mundane meatworld. Reading Cadigan’s novel as a feminist narrative about “the relation of the material body to cyberspace,” she explores the main characters’ interactions with the System, taking special note of how gender complicates the equation.98

  To Balsamo, the two female hackers, Gina and Sam (a teenager who likes to pummel her eardrums with “speed-thrash”) “actively manipulate the dimensions of cybernetic space in order to communicate with other people,” whereas Mark and Gabe (a near-future Walter Mitty who spends much of his time lost in virtual reality fantasies) are “addicted to cyberspace for the release it offers from the loneliness of their material bodies.”99 This opposition is dramatized in the novel’s climax, when all terminals connected to the System crash, infected by the viral entity created when Visual Mark melds with a mysterious AI. Gina and Gabe exorcize cyberspace via a terminal powered by Sam’s body: An insulin-pump device, its needles poked into Sam’s abdomen, provides the power. Gina, a synner of no small talent, and Sam, a hacker known for her acrobatic exploits in cyberspace, are SF examples of Haraway’s feminist cyborgs: In a cybernetic society, their technological skills have won them at least a modicum of personal and political power.

  Then, too, they represent a more holistic vision of Homo Cyber than cyberpunk antiheroes such as Case or Molly: Sam’s insulin-powered hacking symbolizes a reconciliation of meat and mind, organic and synthetic-Haraway’s cyborg politics at work. Synners “offers an alternative vision of technological embodiment,” writes Balsamo, “where technology isn’t the means of escape from or transcendence of the body, but rather a means of communication with other bodies.”100 At the same time, she warns, the very technologies that create new contexts for wraithlike data bodies simultaneously “enable new forms of repression of the material body.”101

  Phantom Limbs

  See how computers are getting under our skin. Everything about our bodies is stored in our genes. And someday, everything about our genes will be stored in computers. . . . [O]ur high-tech society is creating more information than ever before. About everything from our chromosomal makeup to our credit history. . . . [S]ee how we go about dealing with a technology that not only has great bodies of knowledge, but a great knowledge of bodies.

  —magazine ad for the PBS program Smithsonian World102

  Her driver’s license.

  Her credit cards.

  Her bank accounts.

  Her identity.

  Deleted.

  —poster for the movie The Net

  In cyberculture, everyone has phantom limbs: digital doppelgängers stand in for all of us in the databases of governmental agencies, transnational banks, insurance companies, credit bureaus, and direct mail marketers, rendering us visible and, increasingly, manipulable.

  As Jeffrey Rothfeder argues in Privacy for Sale: How Computerization Has Made Everyone’s Private Life an Open Secret, our physical bodies are now texts in the literal rather than the poststructuralist sense, open books to all who access the databank in question. It is a little-known fact that the confidentiality of medical records is not guaranteed by law; government workers, prospective employers, educational institutions, the media, private investigators, and what Rothfeder calls “people with a vested interest in uncovering all they can about someone they want to turn a dirty deal on” routinely peruse computerized patient files.103 There is much to peruse: Medical records, according to the American Medical Records Association, contain “more intimate details about an individual than can be found in any single document.”104

  The results of these perusals can be devastating. Rothfeder tells one well-documented horror story after another: David Castle, a freelance artist, was denied disability coverage because information about him in the databanks of the Medical Information Bureau (MIB) incorrectly noted that he had AIDS; John Friedkin, a freelance writer, had difficulty obtaining a life insurance policy because of an MIB clerk’s data entry error that coded him as suffering from extreme psychosis. Worse yet, informs Rothfeder, access to the results of genetic tests have compelled insurance companies “to intrude on extremely sensitive and private decisions, even to force their will on a couple trying to decide whether a baby should be born or aborted, or to dictate with economic sanctions whether a couple should conceive or not.”105

  Bodies reconstituted as information floating in data banks can have a profound impact on physical bodies in the real world. This information-age truism is the point of departure for The Net, a 1995 cyber-thriller about a hacker who stumbles on a conspiracy to take over the U.S. government. The villains erase her identity by deleting her Social Security information, credit records, and so forth, and replace it with that of a wanted woman. On the run from the police and the conspirators, she laments that each of us has an “electronic shadow, just sitting there, waiting for somebody to screw with it.”

  Steve Kurtz, an assistant professor of art theory at Carnegie-Mellon University, believes that

  social relationships are mediated . . . by the perception of our electronic doubles residing] in cyberspace. Our data bodies–educational records, credit history, bank statements, criminal files-will direct the type [of] social relationship that we have whenever authority (to oversimplify, those who own or control informa
tion) is confronted. . . . Regaining control of the data body is a key act of electronic civil disobedience, [since] it is the most efficient way to return autonomy to the individual.106

  Kurtz is a member of Critical Art Ensemble, an artistic collaborative exploring the intersections of critical theory, technology, and art. In Critical Art Ensemble: The Electronic Disturbance, a theoretical work that is equal parts academic discourse, postmodern SF, and Abbie Hoffmanesque fist-banging, the group plots strategies for “regaining control of the data body.” In cyberculture, argues CAE,

  [a]bstracted representations of the self and the body, separate from the individual, are simultaneously present in numerous locations, interacting and recombining with [other bodies of information], beyond the control of the individual and often to his or her detriment. . . . This situation offers the resistant performer two strategies: one is to contaminate and call attention to corrupted data, while the other is to pass counterfeit data. . . . Greater freedom in the theater of everyday life can be obtained once the virtual theater is infiltrated.107

  Kurtz, who is friends with the transsexual Toni Denise, sees her surreal run-ins with local law enforcement as a funny, down-to-earth example of “electronic civil disobedience” and “regaining control of the data body”:

  When [Toni Denise] was pre-op, she used to ride around in her convertible with her breasts exposed. The cops would pull her over to arrest her [but] when her electronic data proved s/he was male, they would have to let her go. She drove the police nuts! I love Toni-even though her goal is to be the girl next door and to live the life of a “normal” middle-class housewife, she can be no other than a living model of political resistance.108

  Oddly, Kurtz’s poster girl for political resistance is the same person who appears in the CAE videotape Gender Crash, imparting pearls of mallcrawler wisdom such as “I have taken what I was born with and modern technology and created the perfect aesthetic look for me. I have a 39-27-39 body; that’s perfect.” Of course, Naomi Wolf, Donna Haraway, and all who resist the notion of a “perfect” female body and the constricted worldview it implies would beg to differ.

  Irreverent as she is, Toni Denise has little to say about the beauty myths that shaped her vision of femininity or the extent to which her performances in transvestite revues exchange the confines of one gender role for another. Her encomiums to the sublime nightmare of cyberculture (“That’s what the world is becoming, techno-bodies, techno-everything, and I’m the techno-woman of the nineties”) take no notice of the way in which the very technologies that liberated her have disfigured the lives and bodies of other, biological women. Kurtz acknowledges that she

  has little to do with [a] feminist critique. Does she think about what body-beautiful tech has done to women? No, she doesn’t think about women at all. She is searching for the self-contained male universe. Does she know where her ideas on beauty originate? Yes, and it is precisely within this matrix of desire that she is working (“That’s why it is so easy for me to pick up men,” she says). She is a man who has constructed herself as female with male tech for the pleasure of men. . . . [T]he elimination of [biological] women is the goal. Kill all competing objects of desire; this is her cyborg function. . . . For CAE, she is our poster girl within the virtual theater; however, in a general analysis, she has some frightening characteristics.109

  Clearly, finding a way out of Haraway’s “maze of dualisms” is not going to be easy. Michel Foucault’s axiom that transgressions-bodily or otherwise-reaffirm cultural bounds even as they test them is borne out in the ambiguities and contradictions of Toni Denise’s real-life science fiction.

  Unnatural Histories

  ’Roid Rage

  In this age when metal and mechanics are all-powerful, man, in order to survive, must become stronger than the machine, just as he [had] to become stronger than the beasts.

  —Alfred Jarry110

  Bodybuilding represents a last-ditch attempt to hold the body together at a time when genetic engineering and the Human Genome Project remind us, disconcertingly, that a human being is “little more than a cloud of information,” to borrow Thomas Hine’s memorable phrase.111

  There is a giddy dysphoria to our historical moment-a vertigo induced, perhaps, by the fear that even we will one day be dematerialized in a swirl of data-bits, like passengers in a Star Trek transporter. It can hardly be happenstance that the signature sample of techno music, quoted in countless songs, is the phrase “Pure Energy,” spoken by Star Trek’s Mister Spock, or that the climax of The Lawnmower Man occurs when Cyberjobe declares, “I’m going to . . . complete the final stage of my evolution. I’m going to project myself into the mainframe computer; I’ll become pure energy.”

  Considered in this context, the cult of the gymnasium makes cultural sense. With the aid of weight-training machines, nutritional supplements, and anabolic steroids (synthetic testosterone), bodybuilding obses-sives erect an impregnable bulwark of “ripped”—that is, sharply etched-muscles around the notion of an immutable body and an integrated self. Obviously, the notion of being huge and hard in cyberculture is a colossal irony; muscle is redundant in a world where even the easiest tasks-changing channels, switching lights on and off, adjusting the volume on a CD player-are allocated to small, smart, ever more biomorphic devices. “My upper-body musculature, developed largely on Nautilus machines, means that I probably can chop wood or unload trucks, not that I ever will,” writes Barbara Ehrenreich.112 It is for psychological, not physical, reasons that many of us worship at the stations of the Nautilus.

  In a broader cultural sense, however, bodybuilding speaks not only to anthropologist Alan M. Klein’s assertion that “the golden era when ‘men were men’ has passed, and the powerful roles traditionally the exclusive province of men have vanished, weakened, or are no longer gender-specific,” but also to a gnawing anxiety about the future of the body in a cybernetic environment-an environment that still requires the mind, the eye, and the hand but has little use for the rest of the body.113

  Bodybuilding reasserts the validity of human brawn in an age of intelligent machines. It’s an anachronistic desire, of course-a ritual of resistance to industrial modernity that is as old as the steam-age myth of John Henry, the railroad worker who won a contest with a steam drill but died of exhaustion shortly thereafter. “‘Roid rage”—slang for the rampages associated with habitual steroid use-becomes a pun when applied to bodybuilding conceived of both as a rage against the machine and as a practice that paradoxically produces humans who look and behave like machines: android rage. Significantly, technological imagery colors first-person as well as journalistic descriptions of ‘roid rages. In his Village Voice article on bodybuilding, “Living Large,” Paul Solotaroff depicts the former Mr. Universe Steve Michalik as a hormone-addled android whose eyes, like those of the hunter-killer “endoskeletons” in Terminator 2, “went as red as the laser scope on an Uzi” when he was angry.114 In the same article, Michalik recalls the time he ripped off a truck door and caved in the offending driver’s face with one punch: “[I]t was like I was trapped inside a robot body, watching myself do horrible things, and yelling, ‘Stop! Stop!’”115

  The “body proud”—to borrow a term from RoboCop 2-refute the obsolescence of the flesh by twisting their bodies into whip steel, making themselves over in the image of the machine. “Of all the sports conceived by man, none bears a closer resemblance to bodybuilding than auto racing,” notes the Details writer Erik Hedegaard. “The only difference is that one engine is mechanical and the other corporeal.”116 Pop singers, professional wrestlers, movie stars and ordinary gym-goers chisel themselves into futurist sculptures, all sharp edges and flat planes, in unknowing fulfillment of the futurist poet F. T. Marinetti’s rhapsodies about “the imminent, inevitable identification of man with motor.”117 Ads for Evian bottled water feature glistening Aryans whose streamlined physiques look as if they were lathed and polished on some Nordic assembly line.

  The die
-cut piece of work known as the “hard-body” is, at its heart, a machine-age artifact. The effect is achieved by means of a process that presumes the objectification of the physique, a fact hinted at by a phrase that appears on muscle T-shirts: BODY SCULPTING. Stuart Ewen has noted the convergence of the “principles of instrumental reason, engineering, and technological regimentation” in the weight room, where gym-goers move along an assembly line of “stations,” or Nautilus machines, each of which exercises a different muscle group.118 The body is conceived of as an interlocking assemblage of machinelike components, and the desired effect, in which glutes, lats, pecs, and abs stand out in sharp relief, resembles the product of a punch press.

  It seems only appropriate that the cultural icon for the late eighties and early nineties should turn out to be Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger, an ex-steroid-using former weight lifter best known for his portrayal of a predatory cyborg in The Terminator (1984). Schwarzenegger is at once a pumped-up hunk and an affectless automaton whose acting ability falls just short of Disneyland’s Mr. Lincoln, an Audio-Animatronic dummy brought to life by bursts of pressurized air. His physique reconciles the male centerfold, all rippling pecs, and an exploded view of the internal combustion engine. In Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder, Sam Fussell describes Schwarzenegger in tellingly mechanomorphic terms: The champion bodybuilder “used the weight room as his smithy” in the creation of an ironclad “human fortress . . . to keep the enemy host at bay”—the “enemy host” being, in Fussell’s mind, the school-yard toughs and sand-kicking bullies of the world.119