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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 21.41-42 (2004): 87-101 Augmented Bodies: Upon breaching the postmodern eschaton, the body morphs through a technologically expanding Information Age, where the fundamental relation between entropy, language and information play an increasingly crucial role. Frederic Jameson (1988) has argued that postmodernity produces new utopian spaces that express desires emanating from our own historical time and place. In the late-capitalist world, social relations and political institutions have undergone a transformation whose consequences displaced the utopian impulse onto a multiplicity of bodies, spaces and landscapes. One of the sites invested by these impulses is the individual, solitary body. Reconfigured as a libidinal site for the projection of our desires, private postmodern “utopias reflect a belief that the only valid remaining space of perfection lies, ready at hand, in our own individual flesh: a paradise of curves and muscle” (Morris 1998: 137). The “body” therefore, enters a process of productive becoming that threatens to lead somewhere “beyond” the human. This margin excretes a grotesque double that cannot be fully assimilated within the official discourses. The “grotesque body,” is a virtual becoming of the body. Following Deleuze and Guattari we will ask: what can the body do? In this vain, I propose to follow Ovid and speak of ‘bodies changed to different forms’ by mediating this movement of becoming through the concept of “augmentation”. In what follows I will map the symbolic topography of the augmented body as it is imaginatively and discursively constituted along the fringes of cyberculture, technoculture and avant-garde body art. After delineating the contours and forms of these postmodern bodies, I will conceptually fold them back onto the question of how to “think” the body and argue that the challenge of the posthuman constitutes a threat to the “status quo” of the bourgeois image of the body and its ideological apparatus…as it murmurs and calls from an unobserved underground that communicates through “secret masonic signals” (Jameson 1988: 32). The concept of “the body” suggests a bounded and autonomous entity, singular yet universal. Upon traversing postmodernity, the body is set adrift in a sea of mass culture, where it is quickly repackaged and dematerialized into a pure surface or simulacrum (Durham: 1998). Instead [end page 87] of being a copy of an original, the simulacrum is a mere copy of a copy that produces a surface effect of identity through reproduction and replication. In the fashion savvy world of the spectacle, it is not a question of distinguishing between a copy and an original but rather between a good copy and a false copy. According to the Deleuzian reading of Plato’s Sophist, the good copy maintains an internal participation with the original (Idea) while the false copy or phantasm claims no grounding in an original, only an external relation based on similitude. The simulacrum, in lacking all internal participation with the original, is dangerous because it harbours the powers of the false and leads us astray. When utopia and the simulacrum collide on the surfaces of the body they send off shock waves whose displacements cause the postmodern body to become not only an object of vision, wherein self and body are thought to “coincide” in the image of bodily perfection, but also a set of discursive practices connected by desire and driven by a discipline of the body craving for something it (supposedly) lacks. The image of the perfect body is constructed by way of appealing to a set of values intrinsic to the Greek and Renaissance conception of the classical body whose representation was embodied in the statuary. By being mounted on a plinth and raised above the viewer, the classical statue acquired an elevated and monumental status that pointed towards a transcendent individualism. In gazing up at the figure in contemplative admiration, the spectator participates in a static yet universal relation that conceives of the body as a finished work that has already reached the heights of perfection and becomes an aesthetic standard. The classical body, therefore, claims to share a link with the original which we must imitate. “In Bakhtin the ‘classical body’ denotes the inherent form of the high official culture and suggests that the shape and plasticity of the human body is indissociable from the shape and plasticity of discursive material and social norm in a collectivity” (Stallybrass & White 1986: 21). The discursive constructions of the classical body carried an organizing principle that reflected the official worldview. These discursively embedded regulating systems function as homogenous and centralizing forces that uphold the status quo of officialdom. The body is always in the process of being disciplined and contained by an implicit social image of wholeness, health and beauty. This reterritorialization of the body onto the image has further consequences however. The fundamental postmodern belief in the powers of self-creation marks a break with previous utopian thought which viewed the body as “given.”[1] This emphasis places new constraints on pleasure. The excessive disciplinarity of a “healthy lifestyle” obsessed with becoming a copy of the perfect image also reveals a constructive or positive impulse. [end page 88] The postmodern body is an assemblage that must be “constructed” and sculpted according to the gaze. This negative understanding of the simulacrum can be seen at work most clearly in discourses dealing with health and illness. The production of the postmodern body displaces the role of health from social by-product to highest good. “Health no longer refers… to the ideal social state that generates it but instead signifies the perfection of a single private self” (Morris 1998: 139). The beautiful body is the healthy body (one’s actual state of health is however unimportant; in the age of the spectacle the body must merely appear healthy). As a consequence, any “illnesses that accompany the attainment of perfect form… must be concealed and denied” (Morris 1998: 139). All excess that departs from the classical form is scrutinized and submitted to a binary operation of inclusion/exclusion. The ultimate function of the utopian body is not to draw a distinction between healthy bodies and sick bodies but rather to protect the underpinnings of the image of the bourgeois body from becoming contaminated and unhinged from its original ground. This negative understanding of the utopian body closes it off from all mutant becomings and deformations at the exact moment that it discovers the limit.[2] In doing so it unknowingly excretes a grotesque double. The grotesque body, as Bakhtin makes clear, has its discursive norms too: impurity (both in the sense of dirt and mixed categories), heterogeneity, masking, protuberant distension, disproportion, exorbitancy, clamour, decentered or eccentric arrangements, a focus upon gaps, orifices and symbolic filth (what Mary Douglas call ‘matter out of place’), physical need and pleasures of the ‘lower bodily stratum’, materiality and parody”. (Stallybrass & White 1986: 23) By being constructed through a different organizing principle, the grotesque or augmented body breaks with the ancient Greek conception of the classical body “which was always the body as contained within and reflecting both the democratic state and the moral aesthetic realm of ideal form” (Morris 1998: 137). In coupling the body to a medical discourse, numerous commentators inextricably link our dreams of physical perfection with contemporary illness and transform the problematic of the postmodern body to a simple binary system of practices producing “health” or “illness.” This position inevitably leads us to a negative reading of postmodern body “augmentation” as a symptom of “the psycho-pathology of utopian desire” (Morris 1998: 140). The production of postmodern bodies is hence limited to practices aimed at replicating the ideal consumer image of desire. Like a flashback of the conservative [end page 89] utopian stance, the “status quo” of the normal healthy body is firmly upheld by denouncing the augmented body as a false suitor peddling a dystopian and grotesque body. In being situated at the limits of the posthuman, this abject and grotesque body radically problematizes the image of the utopian body. Following Deleuze (1990), we reject the negative understanding of the simulacrum and instead read its “powers of the false” as an affirmative expression of the bodies’ potential for radical metamorphosis. We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body. (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 257) The grotesque or augmented body can only lay claim to utopia through the very transformation of its discursive norms. Deformities and abnormalities of the flesh are not admitted into a bourgeois utopia and must be policed by the “authorities” and scrutinized by the medical gaze precisely because they are constitutive of the category of the normal healthy body. In being doubled, the monstrous body is the obscene underside of the bourgeois body. Skirting its edges it forces us to see all mutations of the body as inhabitants of dystopian realms. Under its conservative guises, utopia is a project aimed at erasing radical difference through a harmonious social embrace that looks backwards to an original Eden, where all disorder and monstrosity has been sealed off and dispersed to an outside space. In this sense, utopia can be characterised as the (no) place that has banished all monsters…but monsters always return. The body not only morphs upon entering the nether world of liminality but this morphing of the body is necessarily monstrous. Modernity is littered with monstrous inventions. All we see are the spasms of a contorting organism being dipped into a pre-ontological soup…gender-bending, dissolving, mutating, elongating and reconstructing features that stretch and shrink beyond the human imagination. The monstrous is a movement…a pulse…a line of flight…a bolt of lightning that distorts bodies as it passes through them. Monsters mark the edges and ridges of modernity, cloaked in its shadows and masks; popping up along its fault lines and crevices. The embryonic discursive roots of augmentation are indelibly link with the creation of the modern monster. At this juncture, classical aesthetics enters the realm of teratology. [end page 90] Monsters Teratology is the art of creating monsters. The demiurgic impulse, smuggled into modernity through teratology, is expressed in the act of creation and the monster is the excess of this impulse, embodied as a distortion of the profane dimension of flesh. The monster is distorted living matter. We are terrified of the monstrous not only because it is hideous and frightening but also because it points to an even more ominous presence. The greater evil languishing in the shadows is the creator or mad scientist. We can map this movement as a double articulation that establishes a field of resonances that are at once symptomatically present in the (low) discursive networks feeding the popular imagination and in the (high) discursive practices of modern science, evolutionary theory and medicine. The former articulation is born out of the hypnagogic reveries of Mary Shelley and immortalized in her novel Frankenstein (1816), written during the Romantic Movement of the early 19th century. Frankenstein slowly found its way into the Edison Studios in 1910, where it was spliced into a one-reel film of the same name. The imaginary matrix that would catapult Boris Karloff into cult stardom was up and running by the time the 1931 Universal Film version of the monster was released; setting off a proliferation of familial ties and descendents ranging from The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) to the Mel Brooks parody Young Frankenstein (1974), to the cult classic Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and such B-movie extravaganzas like The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965) and most recently, the horribly bad Rock & Roll Frankenstein (1999), where a music agent has his nephew genetically engineer a super rock star from pieces of the greats. Frankenstein functions as an extension of the lightning bolt that crackled and surged with the birth of modern cities and the capture and taming of the electrical field. Frankenstein and all of his bastard progeny and mutant couplings are anxious symptoms produced by the deterritorialized mythology of modernity and the problems aroused by evil geniuses. The second articulation arises from the discursive complex of emerging evolutionary theory, science, medicine and the contemporary racial anxieties of the times. The science of eugenics, the forerunner of modern human genetics, was founded by Francis Galton in 1870 and taking its cues from the breeding of plants and animals, it aimed to raise the miserable standard of the human race; perhaps undoubtedly a utopian enterprise in the face of urban squalor, industrialization and social degeneration. A cousin of Darwin, Galton advocated a process of biosocial selection that would take direct control over human reproduction with the hopes of eliminating the unfit, the ailing, the incompetent and underdeveloped people crowding the [end page 91] world. The rediscovery, in 1900, of Gregor Mendel’s laws of recombination of hereditary characteristics in plants (identifying genes as the single biological determinants) reinforced eugenics and expounded it as a rational approach to the problems of the new century. Sweeping across Europe and America with enforced sterilization laws targeting the diseased and deficient, the science of race improvement was a hit; only falling into disrepute after the Nazi state crumbled. Before crumbling however, Josef Mengele articulated a project that caused the neo-classical and monumental features of Aryan art to become monstrous at the hands of the S.S. through their secret medical experimentations with humans at Auschwitz and Birkenau. The cold fascist body constructed in these camps was the obscene underside of the idea of creating a superior race elevated to aesthetic dimensions. The religious deification of scientists under the Nazi regime managed to turn science into a type of sacred art that no longer conceptualized humans as singular beings but rather as products of a superior (human) “creator” capable of scientifically manipulating a malleable biological palette of expressions. The demiurgic impulse of refabricating the living by way of creating a superior human race through genetic manipulation, as Paul Virilio (2002) points out, produces a crucial shift from the human experiment to human-experiments. The link established between Nazi art and cruelty is the embryo of a terrorist dimension in art that extends into the capitalist world where the coupling of art and genetics transforms into the two-headed hydra of bio-genetics and economics under late-capitalism. Instead of a single Creator we now have many creators – companies, cults, high tech laboratories – Monsanto, Novartis, the Raelians, etc. The discursive links to fascism however were submerged by the ensuing reorganization of the social field after the Second World War. They are nevertheless present, under various guises, in the cybernetic discourses and experimentations that paved the way for the cyborg. The Cyborg The movement from scary monsters to super freaks folds in on itself when restorative and normalizing technologies deterritorialize into reconfiguring and enhancing technologies. The word “cyborg” (itself a hybrid combining “cybernetic” with “organism”) was first coined in 1960 by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline (1995) in their attempt to imagine a solution to the barriers posed by human extraterrestrial exploration: “The cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new [end page 92] environments” (1960/1995: 31). From the start, the cyborg is a fluctuating embryonic cauldron bridging and melding the organic with the machinic; it is the unfolding of an unnatural becoming – a freakish nuptial against nature that couples and merges organism with mechanism; while spawning new myths and tools. If we follow Donna Haraway’s manifesto (1985), the borg is produced at the interface between automaton and autonomy; skirting rhizomatically along the boundaries separating humans from animals and self-governing machines (robots or automatons) from living organisms. Its movement is problematic as it blurs and distorts these boundaries; turning them into permeable membranes, opening sub-terranean flows as forms dissolve in one swift morph or methodically sluggish…part by part…function by function… with each of these relations imperceptibly metamorphosing before our very eyes. It is clear that the body is being invaded by technology. Borging, morphing and mutating; the endo-colonization has begun. In fact, it looks like grandma was turned into a borg way before it was cool to be one. This invasion of the body snatchers consumes and transforms the body not only by replacing lost limbs or restoring the functions of ailing organs with molar “flesh-eating prosthetics,” such as rechargeable pacemakers, synthetic knee and hip joints, artificial hearts, portable respirators, prosthetic limbs, and microchip implants, but also by normalization and regulating its organic flows; by fixing natures mistakes, reprogramming the genetic code, transforming monsters into humans and humans into cyborgs, clones and mutants. The cyborg acquires its power not from its lack but through its excess. The post-human is at once an excessive human and a monstrous remainder of the human. Reconfigured humans can be modified to enter hostile environments such as space, wars or the deep sea by being equipped with exo-skeletons. Stelarc has perhaps gone farthest in this direction.[3] A further extension of the body was brought about by the revolution in transmission technologies, such as tele-audition, tele-operation and wearable cybernetic devices, like Jaron Lanier’s virtual reality systems or Steve Mann’s “eyetap glasses,” composed of several lasers, micro-video cameras, and a half dozen tiny computers strapped to his body in a fanny pack which act as a compact electronic studio allowing him to augment his experience of reality by projecting cybernetic loops into his sensorial field. This movement surges into the enhancement of the body through cosmetic surgeries (from breast implants to face lifts) to the performance body art of Orlan. Cybernetic procedures have become so complex that we can no longer separate artificial selection from information selection. Advances in bio-medical engineering made the cyborg and clone possible. The borging of [end page 93] the body began with transplants and extends into implants. The introduction of microchip implants directly into the body was successfully accomplished by Dr. Kevin Warwick. By implanting a microchip into his nervous system, he was able to move a mechanical hand and control a wheelchair solely by ‘thinking’ about it. His implant functions by sending signals back and forth between his nervous system and a computer, altering the way he senses and interacts with reality. This movement overspills into the implanting of code, genetic or otherwise, into the organism. The production of transgenic plants and animals involving the introduction of DNA sequences from one organism into another organism is a type of morphing. What becomes essential in these procedures is information; the program, the code, and the sequence. In 1991, the Princeton-based DNX-corporation injected clones of human DNA into fertilized swine eggs and created a morphed pig that produces human haemoglobin. The Human Genome Project is the map opening the way to a multiplicity of human becomings. The human form liquefies when morphing; flowing and running through various cracks and fissures towards a body without organs before being captured and sedimented anew. If we are to believe the Raelians, human clones are suckling at the breast. The appearance of an augmented entity entered the popular imagination in the form of comic book heroes. Superman (1938), the man of steel, may have been an illegal alien from the planet Krypton but he was faster than a speeding bullet and was capable of flying. Batman (1939) had a lot of money but no superpowers, just fancy gadgets like the Bat mobile. The first truly cyborgian figure is Captain America (1941) created by injecting “super-soldier serum” into the 98 pound weakling Steve Rogers. A more common way of acquiring superpowers is through accidental exposure to radiation, as was the case with the Hulk, Spider-Man and DareDevil. From these initial embryonic super-heroes, the comic book industry continues to pound out a multiplicity of cyborgs, robots and mutants with an assortment of superpowers – The X-Men, Deathlock, Omega Red, etc – that over spill into popular science fiction movies such as The Terminator (1984) and Robo-Cop (1987) not to mention classic television shows like The Six-Million-Dollar Man (1974-1978) and Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994). The imagination is a fount of hybrids that express our “gnawing anxiety about the future of the body in a cybernetic environment” (Dery 1996: 261). Such anxieties concerning the future of the body are not new. During the Industrial revolution, the steam-age myth of John Henry, the railroad worker who beat a steam drill only to die of exhaustion, functioned to symbolize resistance to industrial modernity. Similarly, “[b]odybuilding reasserts the validity of human brawn in an age of intelligent machines” [end page 94] (Dery 1996: 261). Daily workouts consisting of repetitive pumping, bench pressing, squatting, and curling stacks of 100 pound plates mounted on exercise machines are necessary in erecting the hard body. Enhanced muscles pushed by “roids,” overcome our body anxiety by turning into what it resisted. The boundary between organism and machine quickly blurs. “Roid rage… 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” (Dery 1996: 261). Bodybuilders “refute the obsolescence of the flesh by twisting their bodies into whip steel, making themselves over in the image of the machine” (Dery 1996: 261). Perhaps even fulfilling the futurist rhapsodies of F.T. Marinetti that point to “the imminent, inevitable identification of man with motor” (Marinetti 1972: 91). The bodybuilder is a machine-age artefact and it is best expressed in the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger as “The Terminator.” This simulacrum manages to divulge a strange link between two entirely different sub-cultures: hard-core bodybuilders and cyberpunks. Both bodybuilders and cyberpunks arrive, by opposite routes and with different baggage, at the same place: the ‘metallization of man’ imagined by Marinetti. In that sense, they are two sides of the same coin, although the hard-bodies worship of a sublime Renaissance humanism symbolized by Michelangelo’s David… blinds them to the glaring irony that their machine-tooled, often chemically enhanced bodies are already posthuman. (Dery 1996: 263) Cyberpunk arrives at this “place” through their desire to get rid of the meat: “The opposition of the dead, heavy flesh…and the ethereal body of information – the discorporated self – is one of cyberculture’s defining dualisms…the body is a vestigial appendage no longer needed by late twentieth-century Homo sapiens” (Dery 1996: 248). Cyberculture cannot resist the tendency to envisage the human as arising out of and leading away from the animal world. In the world of cyborgs, getting rid of the meat is akin to shedding the “monkey body”; it is equated with an “evolutionary” leap.[4] Some of the biggest proponents of the discursive complex that views the next evolutionary transformation of the human as taking place in a virtual space beyond the monkey body are the Extropian Transhumanists.[5] Wrapped in the new garbs of a techno-babble, we can make out the glimmerings of a Gnostic trace peeking from behind the veneer of the digital miasma. A powerful religio-mythic sensibility traverses the highways and byways of the Information Age. The eternal return of this undigested kernel haunts certain strains of the [end page 95] spiritual circuitry of technoculture. Enchanted and seduced, once again, by the lure of escaping the body and all of its carnal associations, the Gnostic impulse wanders through the backdoor of the technological firmament in the guise of an “Infomysticism.” The flesh, with its “primitive” and irrational impulses, its secretions and expulsions, and its impure desires, stands on the dark side of a radical divide. An extreme dualism pitting body against mind, world against self, matter against spirit, characterizes this Gnostic stance. An excessive distrust, hatred and total rejection of the physical body are coupled with the utopian dream of an incorporeal “spirit” floating in an otherworldly realm of bliss. In the discursive cyberscapes of technoculture this plays itself out by folding the idea of a disembodied spirit into the concept of information itself (Davis: 1994). The pure thought of the Cartesian subject undergoes fractal dismemberment, while a technoshamanic crisis ushers in the bits and bytes of a code immersed in an algorithmic pleroma. Recoded as information, the self emerges as a virtualized and digital subjectivity; an info-gnosis if you will. Stripped of its fleshy animality by this reconceptualization, consciousness, for Extropian Transhumanists, becomes something that can be downloaded into a cyberspatial matrix. The climactic moment of liberation attains its zenith at the instant we press the escape button, sucked into the vortex with an orgasmic terminal velocity and baptized by a digital Holy Ghost of pure information. Modern Primitives & Performance Body Art The opposite stance concerning the body is adopted by Modern Primitives[6] who attempt to re-inhabit the body by way of retracing the premodern paths abandoned by a modernist amnesia. They decree that the body should not be forgotten yet its limitations must not be obeyed. Old traditions, superstitions and folk beliefs reintroduce themselves as mutant ex-patriots of the new avant-garde. Embracing a romanticised animist low-tech tribalism and amplified with a mythical high-tech, prosthetically enhanced future, modern primitives reject the 18th century humanist assumption that ‘savages’ and primitives lack reason and are hence literally inhuman or non-human creatures when defined against the ‘reasonable’ nature characterizing “civilized” humans. Recapturing the image of the primitive as an untainted alternative to capitalist industrialisation, they espouse the modernist vision of creating a radically different future for the body by way of directly manipulating, distorting and modifying the body itself. The pursuit of a knowing through pain by piercing sensitive body parts, binding the waist or hanging from hooks over extended periods of time, are the mainstay of performance artists such as Fakir Mustafar. These ritualistic processes of directly manipu-lating the boundaries of the body act as drivers that cause an alteration of [end page 96] consciousness that leads to a purported transcendental absorption into the divine. By inflicting pain on his body, Mustafar not only attempts to reorganize the boundaries of the flesh but also reconnect his con-sciousness to an archaic world where science and magic are fused through ritual. By weaving sadomasochistic practices taken from the S & M subculture their critique of modernism acquires an unusually kinetic element that goes beyond the inscription of the body and into the realm of sensation. Such acts aim not only to awaken the body from the numbing effects of modernisation and industrialisation but also to reorganise and to create new zones and experiences of pleasure and pain. Such practices push the critique of the bourgeoisie begun by the Surrealist, Futurist, Expressionist, and Dada movements by incorporating so called “primitive” practices and customs of elongation, coloration, tattooing and piercing, as a means to shock the traditions, morals and aesthetic sensibilities of the yuppie neo-liberal mind. When these primitive practices are combined with invasive technological prosthetics and implants, we enter the dermal body of Orlan,[7] which inhabits the liminal site where the virtual fuses with the visceral. Orlan is the pseudonym (taken from Caravaggio’s St. Orlan & the Elders) used by the performance artist and French art history professor engaged in the radical practice of transforming her face and body, through a series of cosmetic surgeries, into a pastiche composed of iconic features taken from classical, Baroque and Renaissance art and mytho-logy. Her surgeon, guided by a computer generated composite image, slowly transforms her into a copy of this digital representation in her performance art piece entitled “The Reincarnation of St. Orlan.” The fore-head of the Mona Lisa is combined with the nose of Diana, the eyes of Gérôme’s Psyche and the mouth of Boucher’s Europa, among others. The surgical operating room is transformed into a bizarre spectacle as half naked men perform a strip tease while Orlan reads passages from Lacan’s essay “The Mirror Stage” or Kristeva’s Powers of Horror; the surgeons, dressed in haute couture fashions, prod, cut and incise her face, all the while beaming the operation live via satellite to art galleries in Tokyo, New York, Paris, and other parts of the world. At times Orlan will even answer telephone calls, faxes and emails, from her stunned audience watching the procedure. The viscera and fat extracted from her body are sold in “reliquaries” to adoring fans. In one of her latest “exhibits” she asked the surgeon to place synthetic cheek bones under the dermal tissue of her temples, thus slightly deforming her facial appearance even further. In her obsession to stage absurd “situations” she shares a link with the Situationists and their desire to transform life through art. The thrust of this piece of “carnal art” can also be read as a statement con-[end page 97]cerning the profound reorganization undergone by the human senses in the wake of the new technologies and mass media. This reconfigured “theatre of cruelty” (inspired by Artaud) sets up a strange “correspon-dence” where the clinical, visual and aesthetic realms meet “on stage” simultaneously while questioning notions of feminine beauty, subjectivity, signification, technology, the body and the commodified art object. For 40 days after each surgery Orlan photographs her bruised face and body, documenting the “recovery” process while attempting to capture the plasticity of the body on film. When the entire process of “reincarnation” is complete, Orlan will hire an advertisement firm to assign her a new name. So, who cares about one’s name after proclaiming that the modern body is obsolete? Obscene Post-Utopian Bodies In defying the normative assumptions concerning human bodies, monsters, cyborgs, Extropians, and avant-garde artists blur the very categories that function to demarcate and constrain their becomings. The modernist binaries of male/female, natural/unnatural, normal/abnormal, fact/fiction, organism/machine, etc, become amorphous and consequently deterritorialize the discursive social field by way of introducing a multiplicity of novel hybrids that threaten to breakdown the very binary distinctions that shape them. The problematization of augmented bodies becomes critical when the question of the posthuman is folded back onto the traditional (bourgeois) concept of the human body to reveal that we harbour anthropocentric and anthropomorphic notions concerning the human body. In extending the range of freedoms championed by social and critical utopians to the freedom of modifying ones organism and consciousness through technological manipulation and augmentation, the image of the posthuman carries with it the threat of annihilating the notions of human integrity, inviolability, supremacy and individual agency that still linger as leftovers from the traditional concept of utopia. In being displaced to the beyond of the posthuman body, utopia secures the power of transformation as its critical function. In doing so, we become aware of our resistance to the fluxes of becoming. This is seen most clearly when discursive constructions pose the question of an “evolution” that is not natural but rather artificial. In fact we may also ask the rhetorical question: has the human ever been ‘natural’? An anti-humanist reading of evolution would locate these artificial and synthetic becomings of the body within a “machinic” understanding that re-evaluates the machine/organism distinction in terms of its ability to create new and novel connections by means of contagion and contamination. To be driven by the utopian [end page 98] impulse is then to enter into a symbiotic metamorphosis; a state of perpetual transformation that cares nothing about questions of origin. Perhaps we may even say that the augmented body is the not-yet of the radically new organism that forces us to think the inhuman. But there are dangers lurking in this movement of deterritorialization. Having sprung from the wormholes, cracks, and fissures of the social matrix, these morphs, clones, and genetic chimeras, can also pave the way towards a perfect super-human race resistant to everything – high performance entities; super-men and super-women. Does this not also imply the inevitability of the idea of a sub-species? An imperfect transgenic strain, acephalic monsters produced from embryonic stem cells, a body without a forebrain and kept alive for the harvesting of its organs and flesh, organs-without-a-body. In such a world, the human and sub-human inevitably become downgraded versions of the super-human program. The gates of super-racism have flung open. The horrible inflection of Nazi eugenics is the extension of politics into biology. The bio-politics of fascist racism began by treating the deported, gypsies, Jews and homosexuals as sub-humans. In the age of bio-technology, this inflection, as Virilio has pointed out, reaches into the molecular level, into living matter itself and as a consequence threatens to create a form of “racism without races”. When confronted with the monstrous question of the extra-human posed by eugenics the post-war world shuddered and opted to search for the extra-terrestrial. Yet the posthuman knocks at the door, they are here and the alien is home-grown. The discursive networks that problematize the image of the bourgeois body also reveal that the very struggle to conceptualize the augmented body is thoroughly imbued with ideology and enmeshed in the workings of late-capitalism. The body therefore cannot be thought separately from the social formation, however augmented it may be. Enhanced with nanotechnology, artificial organs, steroids, “smart drugs,” and other prosthetics, humans can leave the ape behind, or so they say. The spectre of fascism haunts the birth of biogenetics and the cyborg. The tribal imagination swells into an interconnected network of humans and machines; enhanced and kinetically possessed by the electronic beat of a techno shaman mixing sounds for the dancing throngs; lasers flashing in the darkness, while the flickering image of a human fades in the shadows of a rave. Are we doomed to a fascist posthumanity? [end page 99]
[1]. Traditionally, the object of transformation for utopian thinkers had always been the social body or the social relations of production. The passage to postmodernity displaces the object of transformation onto the individual body. [2]. “The grotesque physical body is invoked both defensively and offensively because it is not simply a powerful image but fundamentally constitutive of the categorical sets through which we live and make sense of the world” (Stallybrass & White 1986: 23). [3]. For pictures and further information on exo-skeletons and Stelarc see: http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/. [4]. The mind-body problem that haunted modernity is purportedly resolved in cyberculture through “the reduction of consciousness to pure quintessence” (Dery 1996: 299). With this formulation we enter the realm of “Infomysticism.” [5]. For more information on Extropian Transhumanists see the web site: http://www.extropy.org/. [6]. For further information on Fakir Mustafar, the father of Modern Primitivism, see: www.bodyplay.com/ and Steve Mizrach http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/Modern_Primitives.html. [7]. For pictures and further information concerning Orlan see the web site “Who is Orlan”: http://english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ecook/courses/eng114em/whoisorlan.htm.
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