- text by Bojana Kunst
- Lecture, first published in: Communication Front 2001, Cyber and my Space - Netizens and the New Geography, June 01 -14, 2001
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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.« 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. In this presentation, I would like to use the description of Wiener’s body as an eloquent anecdotic and methaporical example of the typical position of the body as viewed by western rationalist tradition – namely, as “always in its opposition to the mind” - the position, which let's say seems to reached it's finall oposition in the contemporary body/technology relationship. The same attitude towards the body is namely 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” was just one of the first sings of the cybernetic omnipotence of the mind, 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 really be that the body is 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 cartesian mind?
It seems that the question has been answered affirmatively by a number of important authors (artists, scientists and theorists that deal with contemporary technological reality). Some are more enthusiastic, others less. Let's present here just some examples which are quite disspersed and different in their argumentation but nevertheless in all of them the body is gradually disappearing from the stage, becoming obsolete, dissolved, displaced. Or differently: all this statements are with diffenrent methodoligical approaches describing the main result of the body / technology relationship as disembodiment. The body's dissapearance is interpreted as the main symptom og high-tech reality by Arthur and Marie Luise Kroker: 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. Hans Moravec, author of Mind Children, a very influential work of the eighties, asserts that “we will simply be outclassed” , and describes man’s withdrawal from the organic body in sci-fi manner, what remains from the body is only meat. Allucquere Rosanne Stone in her article "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?", argues, that cyberspace is collapsing nature on the technology: "on the nets", she claims, "warranting, or grounding a persona in a physical body is meaningless", and she goes on to celebrate the "decoupling (of) the body and the subject." 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. It is only after the body has become aware of its momentary situation that it will be able to form post-revolutionary strategies.” 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.” This is the notion for body used by William Gibson, too, he therefore uses the word meat, 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." Inevitable distopian consequences of the dissapearing body are disclosed especcially by two theorists - Jean Baudrillard in Paul Virilo, both making use of fairly critical, even moralistic argumentation. Baudrillard critically describes the body of metastasis, one defying any kind of subjectivity, the lobotomy of the body unoblivious to metaphor, or meaning. 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. Baudrillad 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.
II.
This yielding to the phantasy of the disappearing body in a new technological reality (which could be find in upper statements) is a very complex problem and can be dealt with from several perspectives.
First, the wish for transcendence of the flesh is of course no novel notion but perhaps even the most consistent and continuus idea in western philosophy. The contemporary reedemed body seems to be reached today in its digital sourrounding - 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 immortality wish. (The same body could be find today in the contemporary medicine: the body of the scan, the CET image, the clean body of the gene). At the exciting prospect of the body’s disappearance, the image of the body (or non-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. (Der Mensch ist sozusagen ein Prothessengott geworden, said Freud).
Second, what is even more important is that this "wish" received its philosophical argumentation and scientific validity in the rationalist foundation of modernity. The exclusion of the 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. Therefore – the body could be seen only through the procedure of the “evacuation of consciousness from the world” , 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.” The relevant (body) knowledge is produced only when the real body is finnaly expelled - we could observe such way of knowledge production all the way through the history of modernity and especcially history of modern medicine science. The more secrets of the body we uncover, the more empty and artificial it becomes, subjected to systematization, generalization, control and universal anticipation. It is turned inside out for us just to be able to catch a glimpse of something Other than Body itself. What seems to be so alluring in contemporary technological and scientific 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: to reach this "other" which is on the other side of 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.” TUU 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 as defined by Bruno Latour – 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." To put it differently: purification is another name for the radical boundary thinking »which always leaves out the body to develop the mind.« 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, digital net, a sign finnaly (which could easily be dispersed and lossed in the cyberspace of course). Exactly this purified position of the body is the position which looks seemingly realizable with the contemporary technology and it's celebrated or criticised by authors I mentioned in the first part of the presentation.
Third. Of course, you could justifiedly contradict me and say that we are dealing with the completely different understanding of the space and relationship in general in the contemporary technological reality, with the so called cyberspace. This technological real of cybespace disclosed different networks and ways of coexisting, which are far away from the fixed and hiearhically organised cartesian space. Ontologically fixed space of motionless specator (which is in the same position of the master) is replaced with the endless sensorial and experiential interaction, the traditional lust of finality and hierarchy is dispersed in the endless interweawing and multiplicity of the new networks, the locatedness is replaced with new incalculable geography. The new ways of co-existing and interaction are produced, which are not obliged to the hierarchical and institutional order, but are disclosing the possibility of the new geography of being together in the place which could be described as fluidness, uncertainty, dispersion, contradiction etc. So the dissapearance of the body could be read as the sign of this fluidness of the mind, of this multilayer and speed democracy, it has to be transformed to follow the (artificial) mind. But be very carefull about what kind of body we are speaking here: it is again inferior, subordinated, placed on the other side of the border, as inscribed in the nature which cannot go along anymore with this "sophisticated" "culture", understood as an monolithic idea, which could be easily expelled (with no regard to its incalculable differences, embodiments etc.,). This is the cartesian tradition I'm speaking about and which is still very actual today: the beleiving that there is such a thing as a body (in general), which is generally denoted as dysfunctional, obsolete. This is the tradition which still remains deeply connected to the cartesian space and rationalistic position of the subject: the phantasy of the transcedence has not been yet abbandoned, it's has simply been replaced with a new (let's say postmodern) configuration of detachment (as S. Bordo said) "a new imagination of disembodiment: a dream of being "everywhere," and of course - a dream of being everybody (which is in the final consequence the same as nobody). The result is still the modern phantasy of autonomous, self-sufficient subject: even if it seems that its power is dispersed, that there is new geography dislosed, new non-centralised networks are present, this subject is still very powerfully regulating its own borders and representing himself as clean, detached, free, pure, liquid. The dissapearance of the body could be read as the product of the regulation of the basic modern fear of the autonomous subject, the regulation which could be described with the words of Sherry Turkle: "The computer (which is in her understanding equal to Internet network, cyberspace) takes us beyond the world of dreams and beats because it enables us to contemplate mental life that exist apart from the bodies. It enables us to contemplate dreams which do not need beasts. The computer is an evocative object that causes old boundaries to be renegotiated." This is the believing that the obsoletness, dislocation of the body, decatchment from the body is exactly the big final move, where beasts and their teritories are wanished. But as we all know, as always with the utopian stories, independetly how beautiful they are, they are always partial, exlusive, speaking and dreaming about the privilege, about the exlusion and finally regulation, too.
IV.
But what such utopian statements seems to overlook, however, is that this is not the only known "bodily history" of modernity. To put it differentely: modernity always reflects the body within the dialectics between the utopian and the distopian. Throughout its course, the desire for a replaced, re-modulated, disciplined, non-living body has been clearly accompanied by the fear of revived (emobodied) machinery - e.g. in the romantic tale of Olympia, the myth of Frankenstein, in the electric Eve future, avant-garde (surrealist) 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). Striving to go beyond life and nature, beyond the beasts and their terriories, the purified body produces real monsters indeed. The notion of modernity therefore can not be imagined without the other pole which Latour defines as »traduction« (translation) - "the mixing of genres present as something entirely novel, a hybrid between nature and culture." 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 (psyhoanalitical) fact that "the more forbidden it is to think of hybrids, the more realizable they become." To put this in the contemporary perspective: "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." Cybespace or contemporary technological real therefore does not exist as a coherent technologically created spatial arena but as a discursive site of let's say ideological, representative struggles to define the relationship between the technology and subjectivity, technology and the body (if we are understanding the subjectivity as strictly embodied). It is as Michele Kendrick said, a "cultural conjunction of fictions, projections and also anxieties." From this point of view the phantasy of disappearing body is disclosing to us the fundamental illusion - the one that characterises the body/technology relationship all the way from its rationalist argumentation to its so-called "postmodern omnipresence" through which, according to Jameson, technology finally successes to the place of the other - that of the vanished nature. This illusion is a real basis of the dissapearing body, but it's not really a part of the contemporary debates, mentioned in the first part of the presentation. Both the advocates of the utopian fusion of the mind and the technological reality and the distopians Baudrillard and Virilio talk merely as diagnosticians of the symptoms exhibited by the body / technology relationship. 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. Or, if I parafraze Deleuze, in relation to the technology, body functions as a badly constructed common name for a variety of dysfunctions. At this point the feminist perspective (feminist reading of the history of modernity) could be helpful to touch the kernel of the aforementioned illusion. It could be observed throughout the history of modernity how the dialectics between the utopian / distopian approaches to the body / technology relationship is strictely gendered. With the aesthetic and scientific imagination the woman's body is placed precisely upon the point that discloses the basic fear of the artificial, the point where the artificial strikes back and the horror of body engineering discloses the distopian side of modern progress. There is always a fear present that the technological venture with the woman's body will not be a successful one. The fear of the body-overdose drives others, especially infatuated lovers, to madness and death. The consequences of this kind of attitude also come to light if we consider the aesthetic and cultural images of the female body in relation to the processes of modernisation and technological development in the 20th century. We should ask ourselves what kind of body actually emerged from the "cultural liberation" introduced by modernisation and high technology. The answer could lie in Susan Bordo's notion of "the body of unbearable weight" - the term Bordo views as a symptom of "the gendered nature of mind/body dualism". As a result of boundary thinking, the body of unbearable weight performs the procedure of purification as well as that of the regulation of the aforementioned fear. The main supposition concealed in this understanding is that technology, or the history of it and that of science, is not really the matter of woman; even if regulated by force, woman inevitably carries the burden of the body, a part of unpredictable nature. The distopian representation of the female body is neither just a warning against the failure of utopian idea of progress, nor the sign of nature; it reveals something much more important for the understanding of the organic/technological relationship. Researching the history of technology, Sadie Plant revealed a connection between computer programming, cybernetics, and weaving. The most important fact which is the result of her recongition is that weaving could be interpreted as a body technique, a forerunner of contemporary networking and digital matrixes. The demarcation line dividing body techniques and mind operations thus evaporates; the fact that "the computer was always a simulation of weaving" reveals embodiment in the very heart of programming, and remains a disrupting factor at any attempt to throughly differentiate between life and non-life. The demonic in the female body mocks the basic illusion inherent in the modern understanding of technology - the belief that technological reality is essentially bodiless, non-physical, non-material in character. Or, as American theorist and historian of cybernetics 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 Canguilheim, 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, nature) is expelled into the terrifying domain of distopia. The disappearance 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.
V.
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 the body position in the contemporary technological reality, especcially with the late 20th Century machines which "made thoroughly ambigous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed." 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, which immediately brings us to another, much more interesting problem of today: if boundaries are indeed constructed, why have they been placed as they are?
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 contemporary technological strategies and ways of representation, the most successful of which are contemporary artistic praxes and several feminist theoretical approaches towards technology. Technology symbolizes neither a bright nor a dark side of modernity, nor is it the Other of postmodern aesthetization; the fact that "machines become disturbingly alive," primarily reflects the need for a different (forgotten) 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. This is the radicality of the matter. 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. This does not mean that the body should be left outside, (as, for example, it happens to Gibson’s character Case in Neuromancer), or indicate the end of anthropology, as claims Baudrillard. 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 Latour, but try to observe it without its distopian mark. 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 stop searching for a hierarchically organized organic wholeness - and recode the human body anew. To be the ghost (body) in the machine - this is not a distopian reminder, but one aware of its continuous presence which has always mocked the traditional perception of technology and the self-sufficient status of the latter. When the machine is understood as embodied, when we become aware of the continuous presence of the body playing its game in-between, there also appears the possibility to verify the social inscription of technology, and to establish critical strategies we can employ in the future. With the disembodiment (in cybespace selves are no longer constraint with the rules of unity and organic form - Shaviro, this is also a popular rhetoric) we are appropiating the rhetoric of the liberation of self from the body to foster and idealized notion of the fluid, undiferentiated identity." But as Kendrick said, tu buy into this rhetoric is to lose sight into the specificity of located subjectivness within a cultural and historical context, but not just this, what is even more important we are loosing sight of the ways in which this context is constantlly being reproduced by technological interventions, the sight of the ways in which embodiment was always inscribed and doubling the technological real.
This direction has been taken today by several feminist theorists in terms of embodied subjectivity - a notion several theorists have also inscribed into that of modern hybrids. 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 , transparency, and fluidity, the body reveals itself as it has always been when not seen as something Ohter - it is the place where "new epistemological anxiety is evoked, not over loss, but by the memory, or suggestion of union: sympathetic, associational, bodily response obscures objectivity." Or as says Katherine N. 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.” The human being thus becomes part of a distributed system, with man’s power lying precisely in his dependence. This dynamic partership does not turn the the body into a disrupting remnant of nature, but is revealing 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." What is important is to understood that this is not an utopic story anymore (as it is still with the cyborgs) but a story about (sometimes dirty) interdependence, the story about a very demanding "companion relationship." Or to put it differently: Our artificial partners in this very demanding "companion relationship" are paradoxically the one who are reminding us on the fact, that we should overturn the traditional beleive that a man has a body and rather say that the body has a man. The body is offering itself here as a territory (maybe the last one, as Virilo said), site, the place of trust, the place of (it could be also a constructed gender) but it is offering itself just to disturbe, to intervene in our sense of totality, non-materiality, to intervene in our sense of resemblance and causality, in our inevitable need finally to construct borders, interfaces and utopias. Or to parafrase E. Grosz: for body to becoming cyber only make sense insofar as both the body and the cyber are trasformed in the encounter.