All’s Wells that Ends Wells

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There is no pain! There is no law!

It'd suck to have to spring for two pairs of shoes at a time...

You’ll have to forgive the pun. But how else was I supposed to label my last blog (probably), while simultaneously continuing my habit of making light of literary classics and historical atrocities? It was a tough decision on my part, but I’ve made my peace with it. So, kiddies, here’s your piece of esoterica for the week: Pages 55-63 of Ollivier Dyens’ “The Rise of Cultural Bodies”

Dyens’ conclusions about the plastic body dovetail nicely with the Haraway and Pressman articles we’ve looked at the past two weeks. From Haraway, the idea that a mediated body need not refer to technology. And contra Pressman, a debate over whether the plastic body may be controlled.

This article has that strange, somewhat icky sensibility certain philosophers develop around bodymodding; a febrile, sexual fascination with pain, masochism and torture. Fetish as future. It’s like our evolution must be a painful experience, complete with Cronenbergian images of the flesh agonizingly moulding new limbs without the benefit of a womb. To be different, we must be imposed upon; a foetus slipped a scalpel so that it might do the C-section itself.

What Dyens’ decides from his reading of H.G. Wells and Franz Kafka is that they reflect a particularly late 19th-21st century reconception of these water-filled spacesuits, our skins: “the body would become this century’s fundamental concern, not only because its shape was about to be fundamentally challenged, but also because its specificity (as a receptacle for life) was being diluted and extended into nonorganic phenomena” (59). As Pressman pointed out last week, our definitions of what constitute ‘life’ and ‘living’ are being challenged. Dyens seems to subscribe to the idea that we are all carriers of media and culture, and that our bodies are our means of transmitting these values; more, that we are not carrying passive, unaware passengers but have instead become hosts to identities with individual agency. Our newly logical, plasticized bodies are founded as much upon “social pressure and political repression” as “flesh and genes” (60); we may only change by means of pain.

The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Holocaust, animal testing labs, plastic surgeons, slogging through Kafka. The estrangement of pain. The montage of repulsions.

There’s the shadow of Foucault’s Panopticon looming over Dyens’ analysis of The Metamorphosis, this idea that we can only be free from the prison of surveillance when we are a complete unknown. But to achieve that, one must not know oneself. Be punished. It’s an estrangement that torture seems to offer; it has a psychosexual allure. It leads to Dyens wearing leather pants in forty-degree heat (I imagine). Pressman agrees that the alteration of the body changes its relation to society, but she seems to conclude that it somehow makes us subject to the same control as a machine. The machine, for Dyens is already an apt comparison for humanity; our subjectivities are programmed. If we wish for the freedom we pay lip service to, we must pay a higher price. But that freedom would be so unfamiliar that, paradoxically, it is inhuman.

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From Foocoe, Feeline Trnslshuns 1

Oh, and The Onion continues to make my own humanity possible:

Broadband Umbilical Cords

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“You’re a thing. A construct. They grew you in a fucking lab.”

“But only God can make a tree.”

Artist's Conception of Jaimie Smith-Windsor's Kid

Your context for the week: Jaime Smith-Windsor’s “The Cyborg Mother: A Breached Boundary

We’re going to look at a piece that comes from the opposite polarity of Donna Haraway’s article from last week. Haraway was interested in the cyborg as a metaphor, a springboard to provocative suggestion. Smith-Windsor, by comparison, is concerned with literal technology. She brings its impact home, would bring it closer than home, to her very bosom if she could, were it not for the obstructing bramble of plastic and wires. Haraway was useful in terms of distancing ourselves from a knee-jerk association of the term “cyborg” with projects like Kevin Warwick‘s (I’m pretty sure this guy will accidentally invent SkyNet by the way); our understanding of the word is, after all, heavily mediated by the bombastic paranoia of sci-fi action flicks and ’80s thrash metal (okay, maybe that’s just a reflection of my teen years.)

With our palette somewhat cleansed, then, we may be more receptive to a comparatively mundane, everyday instance of the modern cyborg. Certainly we’ve all seen rose-tinted visions of impossibly tiny preemie babies resting comfortably in their high-tech incubators (usually accompanied by some kind of emotive post-rock a la Sigur Ros’ Staralfur or anything by Explosions in the Sky), but we seldom pause to consider the implications of this particular intersection between humans and technology. It’s all soft focus and chiming chords.

Not so here, as anyone who has read the piece can attest. It’s a strange mix between deeply personal, involving and unflinchingly graphic “diary” excerpts and cool, detached interrogation of the philosophical implications of the process. Admittedly, it’s not terribly difficult to defamiliarize something few of us have put much thought into, but that’s sorta the point. Even (and perhaps especially) essential, lifesaving procedures like mechanically simulated wombs constitute an invasion of the organic body. Smith-Windsor, taking something of a psychoanalytic view of the development of the psyche, suggests that a baby who spends its final trimester in an artificial environment will have a different innate relationship to its mother. This seems to suggest that the bond between an infant and its mother is the result of some type of hardwired imprinting that allows the child to recognize the body which birthed it.

“The human condition becomes the medium itself. The cyborg consciousness becomes, like the clear glass of the incubator, an invisible interface through which everything is mediated – the environment, the experience of living, the means to communicate, the way of ‘knowing.’ The relationship between mother and child itself is mediated by technology. Technology interrupts the relationship, intercepts the exchange of nurturing and needing of the infantile language. The Mother becomes redundant: technology becomes the external womb.” (280)

I find some faults with this way of thinking; personally I don’t believe that a child’s personality or understanding of its mother is substantially shaped by its time in the womb, and Smith-Windsor’s child’s two months in the incubator occurred during a pre-conscious period. With the unfortunate exceptions of long-term health problems, there is little to suggest that children who finish their development in artificial wombs have a different experience of the world than children born in the customary fashion.

I do, however, think that Smith-Windsor raises some interesting questions about how we understand what constitutes “life.” I may often be accused of not having a life, but most would argue that I am “alive.” Were I to suffer some misfortune that left me conscious but unable to breathe unassisted, I would still be thought alive. But if my consciousness were let slip, the machines would go on inflating and deflating my lungs, shocking my blood into motion. “Even after the body expires, the machines keep going. It is not until they are turned off that we are pronounced ‘dead,’” says Smith.

“What is life?” the great poet Harrison once asked (not to be confused with the poet Haddaway, who asked the equally valid question “What is love?”), and the cyborg casts what seems a simple question into doubt. Smith-Windsor concludes, I think, that by reducing the concept of “life” to a process which can be imitated to perfection by a machine we can no longer differentiate ourselves from it. And, she continues in tones dripping with dystopia, if we are no different from machines then we may similarly be valued only in utilitarian terms.

Spooky.

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This Blog is About “The Lawnmower (wo)Man”

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Your naive idiocy makes me VERY ANGRY!

Woman as Assemblage

Alright, this post isn’t about The Lawnmower Man. Not even a little. Men don’t even really enter into it (*phew* says Donna Haraway). But according to my blog stats, I get a coupla hits a day from people looking for The Lawnmower Man, so I figure I should pander to my target audience a little. If you came here looking for that, this post actually is about that movie.

Usually I try to tie those tangents into my argument like I do it all intentional and planned and such, but not this time. Won’t even pretend that wasn’t totally superfluous.

So, what is actually, uh, fluous to this week’s post? We’re looking at Donna Haraway’s A Manifesto for Cyborgs, a masterfully polemic and maddeningly enigmatic piece of rhetoric if ever there was (worth reading if you have twenty minutes to spare). As much as we discussed in class the importance of its context (or more specifically, our lack of awareness of its context), I’m not convinced our collective confusion was entirely based upon the datedness of Haraway’s article. Certainly, it was written to respond to a specific time and place, but it strikes me as one of those

pieces that’s not really bound to one milieu.

Certainly the article has enjoyed an uncommonly long shelf-life, with Haraway’s ideas continuing to be thought of as current while most writing by her contemporaries is rapidly reduced to the status of artifact, of interest only to a sort of cultural archaeologist. This is because Haraway’s writing is not chained to the spec tech of her day; she doesn’t ramble on for paragraphs about a distant future replete with phones without wires or the possibility of a paperless office.  Haraway describes the technology she’s interested in in a single line:  “Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electro-magnetic waves, a section of a spectrum.” Although beautifully written, the sentence tells us next to nothing about the technology (luminology?) upon which she bases her argument; it certainly doesn’t sound like cybernetics or any of the other strains of post/transhumanism I’ve been hammering into the ground on this blog the past coupla weeks.

Which is because it isn’t.  Haraway is talking about the cyborg in terms of pure theory, an ideological avatar, as concrete as “these sunshine belt machines” she conjures. Our class’ comprehension problem isn’t a result of Haraway’s context, but of our own. We have become so used to discussing the social implications of invasive technology like Kevin Warwick’s that we are somewhat blindsided by something which treats cybertech as a metaphor rather than as an imminent literality. Consider:

“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 used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”

Haraway is essentially using the synthetic destruction of binaries which the cyborg innately suggests as a kind of loophole to subversion. Haraway’s Man, the blind Lovecraftian monolith of patriarchy, conceives of the world as orderly and systematic, things that are One and things that are Other, because this gives him a logical basis upon which to justify his dominance. Confusion is to be avoided, as are unaccounted-for interminglings. Kevin Warwick’s project, while more idealistic than Haraway’s dystopian view of “the militant labour of masculinist politics,” is still at heart a utilitarian, serial exercise. One evolutionary step after another, one more way we can impose our will upon the world and shape it to our needs. It moves from one position of certainty to another.

Haraway advocates not being understood, and thus easily categorized and dismissed, as a means to strength and self-determination. She delights in being seen as an Enemy of the comfortable organic Self, has a sense that the quest for indifferent equality has failed and that ironic dualism holds more promise than any idealized monism. When she talks about “reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts,” she’s not just talking about a future where we can telekinetically switch on the TV and summon a bottle of Blue from the fridge. It’s connected to all sorts of feminist theory, from repatriating the vagina (“Not in my backyard!”…) to establishing women as a political body, and it involves augmenting oneself not only with technology but with theory and philosophy and ontology.

The goddess is an ideal, and a deception. The cyborg is a real, and deceptive.

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I don't know what this is meant to represent, but it was on the page I found the Haraway article at, and it's just too goddamn hilarious to not draw attention to.

More search engine terms for my blog: Lawnmower Man, Jeff Fahey, optical illusion, Stanley Aronowitz, boobs

Computer Blue

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What sex will look like in 1999.

Prince is the ideal “new flesh.”

Hold up a moment! Wait. I have a quasi-defensible point here. You can run back to your four cherished Michael Jackson .mp3s in a moment, he’s not getting any deader. Prince though… if we’re going to talk about sex and technology, what better pop cultural point of entry is there? In the mid-80s the grimy wetware-modded cyberpunk futurism of Neuromancer and Videodrome was at its height. Contemporaneously, Prince was in the midst of gutting the organic body of classic post-James Brown funk and soul, replacing the aerobic horn sections of yore with banks of computerized synths, booting live drummers and bassists and granting the genre’s hip-swiveling rhythmic foundation to programmed keyboards. Prince wasn’t anywhere near the first to experiment with electronic instruments, but where Kraftwerk backspaced emotion and New Order begged for companionship contra coitus, the unnatural gleam of Prince’s revolutionary (pun) cyberfunk dripped with sex. Those synths may have been sterile, but they certainly weren’t impotent.

Sure, the lyrics to songs like Darling Nikki and Little Red Corvette were blatantly salacious, but the lyrics to Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express could’ve been about nailing Olivia Newton-John and it still wouldn’t be sexy the way the wholly synthetic Kiss is. Prince’s entire public image, prior to his bizarre symbol period, was about transgression: masculine/feminine, black/white, queer/straight, the sexual/the divine… it was about collapsing binaries, forcing them into a controversial synthesis. I would add the division of man and machine to his collection of folded binaries. There’s a holistic serenity to Prince’s most forward-thinking work, an acceptance of technological integration that jumps from the same zeitgeist as the cyberpunks but emerges with less of the nicotine-stain soot that they wore with such snide pride.

It’s a rule of, uh, “thumb” that human beings can turn any technological advance into something useful for sex. It’s in our wiring, our need for the basic thrust-thrust-twitch of orgasm and the endorphin-drowse closeness afterward, and only the most dogmatic techno-purists (read: enforced-celibate programmers) seem optimistic (let alone enthusiastic) about shedding this primitive urge. The ruggedly pragmatic approach of the cyberpunk movement (and those movements with which it is associated) meant they were unlikely to sidestep the ickier aspects of technologically mediated boot-knocking; Blade Runner‘s pleasurebots and Videodrome‘s cassette-deck womb stem from the same bitterly post-Puritan worldview. Sex will always be present in a cybernetic world, but there’s no guarantee it will be anything but as consumptive and disposable as anything else blowing around the streets.

Lia Hotchkiss is right to identify the “ambivalence” to cybertransformations in cyberfunk-derived fiction. Part of it is a cynical acceptance of the belief that we will always be subject to the dominance of rich men and corporations. Sex is commodified within moments of becoming technologized; if, as the Bad Brains once sung, “we all must pay to cum” then we can be assured the rich man will cum first and everyone else’s pleasure agency declines with their tax bracket. Hence why, quoting Hotchkiss again, one man’s “transcendence of the body” so often forces a “restabilization of the real” for someone else. In the 2009 b-movie Gamer we see an expansion upon William Gibson’s concept of “meta puppet” proxy prostitutes. In the most obvious example, we are treated to an image of an almost baroquely grotesque man, obese and photographed as if he’d recently bathed in crude oil and chicken grease, who pays a monthly fee to remotely manipulate an attractive woman into feeding his fantasies. The woman’s experience is to be trapped within one’s body and experience, while the man is able to transcend his own gender and gruesome appearance to achieve satisfaction. All of Gamer‘s unfortunate puppets correspond to Baudrillard’s concept of the New Schizophrenic, defined as follows:

“[One who is] open to everything in spite of himself,” who experiences “too great a proximity of everything, the unclear promiscuity of everything which touches, invests, and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect him anymore.’” (Tania Modleski qtd. in Hotchkiss)

The optimistic reading of Cronenberg’s films like Videodrome and eXistenZ suggests that leaving one’s body map to become New Flesh is sufficient to sidestep the corporate hierarchy, to slay the sinister Videodrome in other words; “Money Don’t Matter 2 Night” as Prince would have it. Gamer and its ilk posit that you must pay for your technology, and when technology becomes intermingled with something as essential as sex you are subject to complete control. Prince by comparison represents a fantasy of liberation from all bondage, save of the consensual variety; sex as route to revelation, to permanence, to immanence. It’s that attitude, the sense that through cybertransformation we might become something greater than machine or man which prevents even the grimmest cyberpunks from moving past ambivalence into outright despair; we might lose to the corporate machines, but we’ll still look okay bathing in the purple rain.

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Everything beautiful and terrible about robot sex in one pic.