- text by Bojana Kunst
- Lecture at the 1st Medditeranean Congress of Aesthetics, 6 - 8. 11. 2000, Athens, Grece
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I.
In 1914, the young T.S. Eliot spent a quiet Christmas Eve with his schoolfellow, describing him later in his correspondence as »a vegetarian and the lightest eater I have ever seen.«(1) The description pertained to no other than the young Norbert Wiener, the future father of cybernetics, a genius of weak body, and of amazing mind. This indeed appears to be a description of a Cartesian hero proper – one that exerted an enormous influence upon the contemporary concepts of the mind, as well as upon those dealing with the man/machine relationship. Wiener developed the cognitive frame in which people, animals and machines function as information-process devices transmitting and receiving signals, and displaying goal-oriented behaviour. For the first time in human history, subjectivity and computer programmes shared a common field of agency and operation, enabled to co-operate and eventually (not yet, but as a logical step in the future) fuse with one another.(2)
In this presentation, I would like to use the description of Wiener’s body as an eloquent anecdotic example of the typical position of the body as viewed by western rationalist tradition – namely, as “always in its opposition to the mind.”(3) The same attitude towards the body is shared by a number of contemporary body notions which, along with the development of high technology, further radicalise the modified concepts of materiality, subjectivity and the body itself. At first sight, it seems that Wiener’s “weak body” has been replaced with the cybernetic omnipotence of the mind, by communication and mediatization, and become a theoretical, aesthetic and cultural token of the last decades of the 20th century, one clearly reflected in the post-modern obsession with the body. Could it be that we are witnessing the celebration of consistent Cartesian dualism, which finally dissolves in the pure transcendence of the (computer) mind, with the body not only turning into “the lightest eater” (so popular a notion nowadays in terms of eating disorders), but also into a thing denoted as incompetent, dysfunctional, unreliable, inefficient, a loser compelled to eventually surrender the battle with machinery, after having lost the one with the Descartesian mind?(4)
The question has been answered affirmatively by a number of artists, scientists and theorists that deal with contemporary technological reality. Describing and celebrating the disappearance of physical reality, they depict the evolution of the modern mind since Descartes, and show us the inevitable privilege of replacing the body in the development of the new digital, communication and thoroughly mediated realities. Gradually disappearing from the stage, the body is viewed as obsolete, dissolved, displaced, as plain flesh, as being transferred into the transparent digital field of computer data. Arthur Kroker interpret the body’s disappearance as the main symptom of high-tech reality: with the advent of the new communication forms that take place in the virtualisation of flesh, we are sort of becoming redeemed from our bodies.(5) Hans Moravec, author of Mind Children, a very influential work of the eighties, asserts that “we will simply be outclassed”(6), and describes man’s withdrawal from the organic body in sci-fi manner: "The perspective has been changed. The cable connecting the computer simulation with the robotic brain of the surgeon’s hand re-connects itself from the robot to a brand new body, the style, colour and material of which one had previously selected. The metamorphosis is ended.”(7) Hans Moravec and William Gibson denote the body as “meat” – i.e. use a word that “expresses the frustration felt in the contact with the endlessly expendable sphere of information due to the limitations of bodily needs implemented by the travelling consciousness."(8) Performance artist Stelarc strictly refers to his body as obsolete material that needs to be manipulated, upgraded and gradually replaced with technological prosthesis, claiming that the conviction about “the body being obsolete in its form and agency may be the peak of technological madness, but it might as well become the highest form of man’s realization.”(9) As the most radical and utopian movement advocating the phantasy of the disappearing body, cyber-punk exerts significant influence upon the body stereotypes of popular culture. One of its main characteristics is the ecstatic belief in the digital, virtual body, one set free from its traditional limitations (gender, sex, race, biology), and willing to inhabit and fuse with a thoroughly mediated reality matrix. “Technology was invented only to hide the terrible secret of our decaying bodies.”(10)
II.
This yielding to the phantasy of the disappearing body in a new technological reality can be dealt with from several perspectives. At the exciting prospect of the body’s disappearance, the image of the body comes to mind which no longer succumbs to the mortality of nature, and to natural reproduction as the only possibility for it to live on; capable of endless replications of its conscience, the body would finally achieve transcendence and immortality, fusing with (artificial) reason. This would be a body without excesses, gender, orifices, or fluids – a clean, empty body prepared to be transferred to a pure cognitive surface which would finally fulfil our wish for the ecstatic reconciliation of dualistic thinking.(11) We could seek the reasons for it in the rationalist foundations of modernity – and define this phantasy as a consequence of the “evacuation of consciousness from the world”(12), with the latter occupying the position over and above nature, including above that of the body, and thus parading as “the prerequisite for founding any knowledge.”(13) The illusion of the disappearing body seems to promise the achievement of autonomous subjectivity – separate, self-sufficient as to its reflexivity (representability), in other words, finally set free from its dark, irrational, biological, unclassifiable, and unhierarchical limits and determinations. More precisely, what seems to be so alluring in this new technological reality is the illusive possibility for us to transcend the most troublesome and traumatic limitation that has always pursued and threatened the rationalist argumentation of modern subjectivity: the fact that man has always been but part of unpredictable nature, and has thus inevitably been defined as a “transient structure with limited capacity for adaptation and achievement.”(14)
The enthusiasm relating to the disappearing body thus contains a utopian strain that has long been present in modern self-defining. Moreover, it can be viewed as a direct consequence of the eternal, unchangeable aspect of modernity.(15) At this point, I would like to present Latour’s differentiation between the two groups of philosophical and anthropological praxes determining the notion of modernity. The disappearance and replacement of the body in the scope of the all-embracing technological reality can also be understood as a direct consequence of one of the two poles constituting modernity – that of purification that constantly differentiates between “two distinctive ontological zones, i.e. the human on one side and the non-human on the other."(16) To put it differently: purification is another name for the radical boundary thinking »which always leaves out the body to develop the mind.«(17) The main characteristic of the body viewed through the prism of boundary thinking is that, undergoing the anatomic, scientific, aesthetic and technological procedures imposed by purification, the body is gradually becoming a place of non-life, a plain object of scientific interest and that of representation, and a discursive, binnary net, finnaly. (18) This position of the body, seemingly realizable in the new technological and mediated reality, is also celebrated by the so-called “cognitive enthusiasts” I mentioned in the first part of the presentation. What these authors seem to overlook, however, is the fact that the story can also take a completely different, unpleasant turn. "Commonplace is that, in cyberspace, the ability to download consciousness into a computer finally frees people from their bodies - but it also frees the machines from "their" people."(19) The attitude of modernity towards the body inevitably reveals a purified and emptied body(20) - a vision not by far as liberating and exciting as it may have seemed at first sight. Testifying to that fact is the history of modernity; throughout its course, the desire for a replaced, re-modulated, disciplined, non-living body has been clearly accompanied by the fear of revived machinery - e.g. in the romantic tale of Olympia, the myth of Frankenstein, avant-garde reformulations of the body. In all these cases, the remodulated, recultivated and reformed body and nature are threatened by the unpredictable character of hybrid mutations (this standpoint can also account for the modern fear of genetic technology, cloning, or biotechnology).(21) Striving to go beyond life and nature, the purified modern body produces real monsters indeed. At this point, I would like to return to Latour's division. According to Latour, the notion of modernity can not be imagined without the other pole which he defines as »traduction« - "the mixing of genres present as something entirely novel, a hybrid between nature and culture."(22) The understanding of modernity (and accordingly, that of post-modern reality) is only possible with the co-existence of both these praxes - one governed, however, by the paradoxical fact that "the more forbidden it is to think of hybrids, the more realizable they become."(23) To put it differently: Modernity always reflects the body within the dialectics between the utopian and the distopian.
The distopian attitude towards the body's disappearance is advocated by two theorists - Jean Baudrillard in Paul Virilo, both making use of fairly critical, even moralistic argumentation.(24) Baudrillard critically describes the body of metastasis, one defying any kind of subjectivity, the lobotomy of the body unoblivious to metaphor, or meaning.(25) Virilio deals with the invalid body of modernity, one that lost its primary biological functions in its battle with the infinite abilities and rapidity of communication/cognitive systems; he discloses the character of technological/scientific fundamentalism which, by means of the reconstruction of the human body, transmutes natural selection into artificial.(26) Baudrillard and Virilio explore the distopian image of modern posthuman technological reality characterized not only by the disappearance of the body, but also by that of biology, nature and society - the phenomena remaining as transparent, manipulative and simulated images generated by technology and science. Making use of specific diagnostic language (imitated by numerous other theorists dealing with modern cyber reality), Baudrillard and Virilio disclose inevitable consequences of the modern purification process, as well as those of its distopian counterpole.
Both the advocates of the utopian fusion of the mind and the body and the distopians Baudrillard and Virilio talk as diagnosticians of the symptoms exhibited by the relationship between the body and modern technological and media reality. On the level of symptoms, this relationship always confronts us with the opposing standpoints For and Against, with their alternation always proving a matter of politics. In relation to technology, the disappearance of the body is recognized as a symptom, without us actually going into its causes.(27) Or, if I stick to Deleuze, in relation to the body, technology functions as a special kind of sadomasochism, as a badly constructed common name for a variety of dysfunctions. At this point, it is essential for us to consider the things from a different perspective and rephrase the question, without trying to providing answers solely by pointing to different utopias and distopias in this field, but by analysing the fundamental illusion of technology, the one that characterises it all the way from its rationalist and modern role in science to its postmodern omnipresence through which, according to Jameson, technology finally successes to the place of the other - that of the vanished nature.(28) This is the belief that the technological reality is essentialy bodiless, non-physical, non-material in character. Or, as Katherine N. Hayles states it, what is the origin of the belief in non-physicality, or in the non-material character of information? Or, more specifically, as asks Canguilhem, whence the modern illusion that machines originate in the rational? With its place in the very history of the self-understanding of modernity, technology is always represented as the constituent part of purification process, so that the inevitable presence of hybridity (materiality, body, fluidity) is expelled into the terrifying domain of distopia. With the contemporary technological reality, with the late 20th Century machines which "made thoroughly ambigous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed"(29) this understanding and representation of technology is not sufficient anymore. The dissapearance of the body is not the symptom (dysfunction) of the contemporary technological reality but just a falsehood reflextion of the modern instrumental wish to win over ghost in the machine; the ghost which is and was always the body.
At the conclusion let me just focuse on the one essential characteristic of this changed perspective and the theoretical options I find acceptable to actually disclose the multi-layer characters of “posthuman” ontology and aesthetics of the body. Let us once again remember Norbert Wiener and add another meaning to the initial anecdote about “the weak body”. Besides establishing a common front of subjectivity and computer programming, Wiener made another important discovery which never ceased to haunt his scientific work with humanistic doubts and concern. Wiener realized that cybernetics explicitly exposed the problem of the demarcation line dividing the human and the artificial. This was the most important implication inherent in his theory of cybernetics - the proposition that the boundaries of the human being are constructed rather than a solid fact,(30) which immediately brings us to another, much more interesting problem that vexed Wiener and allured his “followers”: if boundaries are indeed constructed, why have they been placed as they are? Or, to put it differently: is it necessary to set boundaries at all? Not only is Wiener’s “weak body” a symptom of modern utopian technological reality and the distopian uproar; it can additionally be understood as a situation, a new intermediacy revealed to us by modern technological strategies and ways of representation, the most successful of which are modern artistic praxes and several feminist theoretical approaches towards technology. Technology symbolizes neither a bright nor a dark side of modernity, nor is it a symptom of postmodern aesthetization; the fact that "machines become disturbingly alive,"(31) primarily reflects the need for a different understanding of the subject, nature and identity. German artist and theoretician Peter Weibel summoned up this proposition very clearly: “Showing that machines can perform mental activities, we unveil the illusory character of the latter: thinking reveals nothing about the nature of the subject.(32) If it indeed seems that the old anthropological question “Am I a man or a machine?” can no longer be answered, if it is no longer possible to determine a clear boarder between the former and the latter, this does not mean we are going to disappear due to the more advanced machinery and be drowned in the all-embracing technological reality; the state as it is, however, calls for certain changes in the definition of man. The redefinition, however, does by no means leave the body outside, (as, for example, it happens to Gibson’s character Case in Neuromancer), or indicate the end of anthropology, as claims Baudrillard.(33) Quite the contrary, it suggests us to reconsider the side of modernity that reached incredible proportions in the age of postmodernism – “traduction” as defined by Bruno Latour, or “the contingent and changeable side of modernity” as described much earlier by Baudelaire – and try to observe it without its distopian mark. Inscribed both into technology and the body, hybridity constitutes a part of the original meaning of techne, which was forgotten by the modern instrumental usage of tehnology and has been criticised already in Heidegger’s work. The development of the high technology which no longer serves the sole purpose of functionality and prothesis, but essentially contributes to the establishment of new realities, enables us to finally stop searching for a hierarchically organized organic wholeness - and recode the human body anew. This direction has been taken by several feminist theorists in terms of embodied subjectivity(34) - a notion several theorists have also inscribed into that of modern hybrids, the most famous of which is of course the cyborg by Donna J. Haraway. In this way, we can also read the discussion between technology and art, which, making use of new ways of referring to identities, deals with the ambivalence of the formulation of the body, and perhaps offers new trust into the individuum and its power to design its own self. Faced with new fronts of representation, the need for openness (Walter Benjamin compares technological procedures with those of surgeons), transparency, and fluidity, the body reveals itself as it has always been; it has, however, never been recognized as part of rational order. As says Hayles: “Teleology is replaced by emergence, objectivism by reflexive epistemology, autonomous will by distributed behaviour, the body as the supporting system of reason by embodiment, and the liberal humanist manifest of control over nature by the dynamic partnership between nature and intelligent machinery..”(35) The human being thus becomes part of a distributed system, with man’s power lying precisely in his dependence. The new construction of identities does not turn the body into something disturbing, a disrupting remnant of nature, but enables it to be perceived as ambivalent, as something already constructed, as something showed through representation in the relation between the organic and the technological. Technological praxes are thus able to reveal the “forgotten” body disturbing to the system, identity and order, one that, according to Kristeva, "does not respect boundaries, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite."(36) What is important is to understood that this is not an utopic story anymore (as it is still with the cyborgs) but interdependence, the story about very demanding companion relationship.
REFERENCES:
(1) "Eliot's letter to Eleanor Hinkley", January 3rd 1915, in: The Letter of T. S. Elliot, p. 77.
(2) The most important Wiener's work in this field is the book Cybernetics or On Control and Communication in Animal and Machine.
(3) Andrew Benjamin: "Introduction", in: The Body, Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Art, p. 6.
(4) The decisive step in the history of this fruitless battle was Ford's assembly line, set up in Detroit in 1914.
(5) Arthur Kroker: The Possessed Individual: Technology and Postmodernity, p. 22.
(6) Hans Moravec, from: P. Weibel, ÈKZ; XX, No. 150 - 151,1992, pp. 69 - 91.
(7) Hans Moravec: "The Universal Robot", in: Out of Control: Ars Electronica 1991, p. 25.
(8) A User's Guide to the New Edge, in: Mondo 2000. p. 170.
(9) Stelarc, in: Virtual Futures, Cybererotics, Technology and Post-human Pragmatism, pp. 116-123.
(10) This is a thought from the novel White Noise by John deLillo.
(11) This is the concept of the body that amazed Mahatma Ghandi when asked about his opinion on Western civilisation: "How can it be that average European was so ready to hand over the custody of his body to the experts (...) as if it were an appendage (...) for which he bore no responsibility!" Bikhu Pareth, Gandhi's Political Philosophy, Macmillian, London 1989, p. 26, from: David E. Cooper: "Technology, Liberation or Enslavement?", Philosophy and Technology, p. 14.
(12) "What Descartes accomplished was not really the separation of mind from body (a separation which has been long anticipated in Greek philosophy since the time of Plato) but the separation of soul from nature." adds Grosz in Volatile Bodies, p. 6.
(13) ibid. p. 6.
(14) Sigmund Freud: Civilisation and Its Discontents, p. 33.
(15) Latour reinterprets and expands the proposition indicated by Charles Baudelaire and taken on by David Harvey and developed in his separation/connection of modernism and postmodernism: "Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; is the one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable." in: Charles Baudelaire: Constantin Guys - Le peintre de la vie moderne, p. 19.
(16) Bruno Latour: Nous n'avons jamais été modernes, p. 21.
(17) Elizabeth Grosz: Volatile Bodies, p. 7.
(18) The body as a site of non-life is understood as the basic paradigm of the beginnings of modern scientific medicine. Michel Foucault deals with epistemological shifts that brought about the birth of modern medicine – e.g. the work of Xavier Bichat, the father of modern anatomical pathology. The modern scientific approach is thus governed by a paradox – it has been enabled by a different view of the dead, with man providing his existence with the dissection enabled by his own elimination. In: Michel Foucault: Naissance de la clinique, p. 146.
(19) Slavoj Zizek: "The Matrix, or, the Two Sides of Perversion".
(20) Foucault refers to it as “the disciplined body”, and medical science as “the anatomical body”.
(21) The same fear is reflected in the history of monsters, especially in that of conjoined twins. "Above all it is the corporeal ambiguity and fluidity , the troublesome lack of fixed definition, the refusal to be either one thing or the other, that marks the monstrous as the site of disruption.", in: Margaret Shildrick: "This Body Which Is Not One: Dealing with Differences", in: Body Modifications, p. 77.
(22) Bruno Latour: Nous n'avons jamais été modernes, p. 20.
(23) ibid. p. 22.
(24) Interestingly, neither of them avoids the paradox of moralism: in popular discussions on high technology, they are usually quoted by the most ardent of high-tech enthusiasts .
(25) in: Jean Baudrillard: Transparence du Mal, p. 13.
(26) Paul Virilio: L'art du moteur, 1993.
(27) I hereby paraphrase Gilles Deleuze: »…illnesses are named after their symptoms, and only later after their causes.«, in: Predstavitev Sacherja – Masocha, p. 99.
(28) in: Frederic Jameson: Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
(29) Donna Haraway: Simians, Cyborgs and Women, p. 152.
(30) This idea is implemented in the famous Wiener's question: "Is the stick of a blind man part of this man?"
(31) Donna Haraway: Symians, Cyborgs and Women, 1991.
(32) Peter Weibel, in: M'ARS, pp. 9 - 15.
(33) "Am I a man or a machine? The answer upon this ontological question exists no more. In some way, this represents the end of anthropology which was imperceptibly abolished by the latest machinery and technology.", Jean Baudrillard: La Transparence du Mal, p. 55.
(34) I hereby refer to Elisabeth Gross, Moira Gatens, Rosi Braidotti.
(35) Katherine N. Hayles: How We Became Posthuman, p. 288.
(36) Julia Kristeva: The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, p. 12.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Baudelaire, Charles: Constantin Guys - Le peintre de la vie moderne, Éditions La Palatine, Geneve 1943.
Baudrillard, Jean: La Transparence du Mal, Essai sur les phénomenes extremes, Galilée, Paris, 1991.
Benjamin, Andrew: "Introduction", in: The Body, Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Art, Academy Editions, 1993, pp. 6 - 7.
Deleuze, Gilles: "Predstavitev Sacherja - Masocha", Mazohizem in Zakon, Alenka Zupancic (ed), Analecta, Ljubljana, 2000.
Dixon, Joan Broadhurst & Cassidy, Eric J.: Virtual Futures, Cybererotics, Technology and Post-human Pragmatism, Routledge, 1998.
Eliot, Thomas Stearns: The Letter of T. S. Elliot, vol. I 1898 - 1922, ed. Valerie Eliot, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, London, 1988.
Fellow, Roger (ed.): Philosophy and Technology, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Foucault, Michel: Naissance de la clinique, Presses Universitaires de France, 1978.
Freud, Sigmund: Civilisation and Its Discontents, W. W. Norton, New York, 1961.
Grosz, Elizabeth: Volatile Bodies, Indiana University Press, Bloomington & Indianapolis, 1984.
Haraway, Donna J.: Symians, Cyborgs and Women, Routledge, New York, 1991.
Hattinger, Gottfried & Weibel, Peter (ed.): Out of Control: Ars Electronica 1991, Landesverlag, Linz, 1991.
Hayles, Katherine N.: How We Became Posthuman, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 1999.
Jameson, Frederic: Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham, 1999.
Kristeva, Julia: The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press, New York, 1982.
Kroker, Arthur: The Possessed Individual: Technology and Postmodernity, Macmillian, London, 1992.
Latour, Bruno: Nous n'avons jamais été modernes, Essai d'anthropologie symétrique, Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 1991.
Body Modifications, Mike Featherstone (ed), Sage Publications, London, 2000.
Virilio, Paul: L'art du moteur, Éditions Galilée, Paris, 1993.
Weibel, Peter: Interview with Peter Weibel, in: M'ARS, 4, pp.1- 4, 1994.
Wiener, Norbert: Cybernetics or On Control and Communication in Animal and Machine, J. Wiley and Sons, New York, 1948.
Zizek, Slavoj: "The Matrix, or, the Two Sides of Perversion", www.nettime.org.