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:
