Ollivier DYENS
Author's profile: Ollivier Dyens works in French and Italian
literature and culture at Louisiana State University. His area of expertise
is technoculture and he has published a number of articles on the subject, most
notably The Emotion of Cyberspace in Leonardo <http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/home.html> and The Cyborg Phenomenology in The Canadian Journal of Film Studies
<http://www.apple.queensu.ca/FSAC/CJFS.html>.
His new book Chair et métal. L'Evolution de l'homme: La Technologie
prend le relais (Metal and Flesh. The Evolution of Man: Technology is
Taking Over) is forthcoming in March 2000 by Les Editions VLB (Montréal) <http://www.edvlb.com>. Dyens is also
a published poet and he is founding editor of the online journal of art and
criticism metal and flesh / chair et métal <http://www.metalandflesh.com>.
<dyens@hotmail.com>.
Cyberpunk, Technoculture, and the Post-Biological Self
Translated from the French by David Laatsch <dlaatsc@lsu.edu>
1. I still remember the excitement I felt when I first saw
James Cameron's Terminator 2. There I was, in the amazing realm of the
movie theatre, faced with something I could not truly define, yet that I knew
instinctively to be important and influential. Before me, a window was suddenly
opened onto a very different world, yet one very much like our own. For the
first time in the history of moving images, we, the audience, could no longer
distinguish between reality (the film's "normal" images) and deception (the
special effects). For all of us, watching in awe, Robert Patrick was truly the
T-1000 and he was truly mutating. We could not believe the screen's bright and
shiny images, yet it was impossible to deny; the special effects were perfect,
deception became a reality.
2. How real are images? How faithful are they to a world we
believe in? Throughout my education, I was taught to embrace the truthfulness
of photographic images (usually called "analogical" because of their so-called
resemblance to the world). But it was true, analogical images were reality;
they could be used in court; they could testify about history; they could record
the most intimate moments of our lives (often becoming more important that these
moments themselves, as Susan Sontag so perceptively noticed twenty years ago);
and, most of all, they, like reality, were extremely resistant to deception
(just think of those poorly altered photos from communist regimes). Many artists
and thinkers considered theses images to be an important component of our common
social and ontological perception of reality. But in the space of a few years,
with the advent of computing technologies, this whole fabric of perception began
to crumble. All of a sudden, images would not reflect "our" reality anymore,
but were becoming both reflections and actors of a strange and mysterious world
made of an entanglement of human beings and machines. I think that the shudder
I felt during Terminator 2 had everything to do with this phenomenon.
James Cameron, along with fabulous technicians and artists, had created a true
new reality, where some beings were both human and technological.
I was suddenly exploring a new world whose reality was that of beautifully impossible
perceptions.
3. I was witness to a revolution in representation. Terminator
2 had "materialized" what so many (from Jameson to Gibson) had already recognized.
Cameron's achievement was not only to make this transformation visible, but
also to make it complete, to blend it perfectly to both the story and its representation.
Thanks to a variety of technologies, the story of Terminator 2 (the physical,
social, and psychological transformation of society by machines) and its representation
(what we see on the screen) reflect one another perfectly, the masterful use
of cinema techniques coalescing both into one perfect sum that seemed to arise
from the strange depths of the future. Because of this movie, one could not
pretend that our common reality was free of machines and their phenomenology.
4. Today, several years later, I still consider that day as
a turning point. From that time to this, I have studied, either closely or at
a distance, representation and its relation to technology. From that moment
forward, I have perceived around me the deep changes and profound mutations
slipping into human thought and biology because and through machine-made representation.
Terminator 2 tore the body from its référents, it
deformed and melted it so as to reshape it later. Watching this film, I realized
that we could not reassemble the body as we had during preceding paradigm shifts,
for we had to account for the body's inherent new ontology: one of liquidity,
plasticity, and multiplicity. As Terminator 2 showed us, the whole ontology
of the body had exploded and could not legitimately be reworked, renegotiated
and rebuilt from the same foundations. Thanks to this movie, I understood that
the body I was raised to believe in -- this unique, stable, intelligent body,
this singular body that sheltered me, was disappearing. From its roots a supple,
plastic, multiple collective was emerging, a collective immersed in a space
and time that I did not yet understand. The body was becoming a science fiction....
5. The world in which we live is on the edge of a major reconstruction.
Many call it paradigmatic because it not only affects us culturally, but physically
and biologically as well. A new way of representing the world is about to change
the actual structures of that same world. This is what Terminator 2 allowed
me to see. Here, I aim at exploring this phenomenon. Through science fiction
texts I examine a Terminator 2 type representation where signs and objects
are no longer in a straight or causal relationship. What the following texts
will allow us to see, in fact, is the gradual transformation of this new representation
into a genuine "geography." That is, into a landscape made of a primordial soup
of machines and humans. In fact, this essay will allow me to show that this
new representation is essentially a model of the abyss. Using very specific
fictions among other things, I will try to illustrate that a sort of fractalization
of the models of the living and the non-living is actually taking place. By
this term, I am suggesting a "place" (i.e., a body, a model, a geography, etc.)
of several representation at once, a "place" that wavers between the finite
and the infinite, that is simultaneously finite and infinite. The model that
I propose here is based in some ways on Deleuze and Guattari's egg-body, but
it is one with no shell, an egg-body that moves, extends, retracts and continually
changes shape -- and Terminator 2, where the body is essentially a fractal
entanglement, where the body endlessly wavers between several states and several
representations at once, is probably the closest example to what I am trying
to postulate.
6. The basic question that arises is the following: how do
we reconcile our traditional models of the body with the new technological ones?
How does one read and understand a model of humanity when human beings no longer
produce or control the relationship between signs and référents,
when signs and référents no longer exist within a stable
a systematic structure but are shared among diverse unstable configurations
(biological, technological, cultural, etc.)? How do we define ourselves when
representations of our own bodies become multiple and quantum-like? Many of
today's thinkers base our new understanding on a concept of post-biology. Post-biology
considers the body as a mosaic of biological, viral, technological, cultural
and political dynamics, all meshed into one unstable pattern. In this model,
the borderline between organic and non-organic dynamics is quite tenuous and
our model of human being is called upon to mingle and to fuse with what was
previously considered un-human, a-human. But if representations of the living
body are really becoming post-biological, then post-biology cannot simply be
a model of a living thing to which technology has been bound. If there is a
post-biological model, we could, in fact, only truly examine it if we ourselves
became (at least in part) post-biological. In fact, the post-biological
model is a simulation of the living no longer having anything to do with
an original, fundamental Idea of the living being. Post-biology is a modelling
that exists in an entirely different time and space -- between matter
instead of in it -- one that lies outside of organic representation.
Post-biology produces entangled, dynamic, and autonomously functioning simulacra.
7. In this article, I approach these questions and phenomena
through the unfolding themes of modern science-fiction. I will use this artistic
genre because it allows me to examine to body through the post-biological viewfinder.
Furthermore, as Scott Bukatman explains, one cannot ignore today's science-fiction
in an era that "sees itself as science fiction" (Bukatman's emphasis).
But despite an emphasis on science fiction, this article is less focussed on
physical modifications than it will be on cognitive ones. When technoculture
addresses post-biology, it does so not by questioning physical modifications
and alterations (considered inevitable). Rather, it questions the model of human
identity and consciousness precisely because physical modifications seem irreversible
(how does one define a conscious human being whose body is in continual mutation?).
Most of the authors examined here agree that today's body is plastic and liquid,
that it has become an egg-body. But is the same true for our minds? How far
can the body change without the mind being affected? Can there be several proprietors
of the same consciousness? Can one be multiple and unique at the same time?
These are essential questions that today's science fiction -- cyberpunk in particular
-- will address.
8. Science-fiction texts will also allow us to see how difficult
it has become to define and delineate a living being precisely and scientifically
(i.e., as an objectively measurable pattern). In fact, the impact of technology
on our perception of life is so great that it prevents the building of any archetype
of the human body. So, confronted with the possibilities of invisible
biological manipulations (i.e., DNA, nanotechnology, implants, prostheses, pace-makers,
etc.), only a constant instability between being and could-be, between finite
and infinite, between presentation and representation allows us to assemble
a useful model of the living body. In truth, as our ability to measure increases
there is also an increase in the instability of even our most time-honoured
representations (such as life and death). Because of technology, the models
of the world we now create are less and less grounded in human terms. And so
it becomes increasingly difficult to define life, intelligence, consciousness,
and what it means to be human in a stable way. Faced with this phenomenon, the
living body no longer has an absolute identity. It can now be anything at will
(i.e., an economic object, a sexual desire, an ideological landscape, a cyborg,
a vehicle, etc.). Our new ontology is that of sand dunes, constantly moving
and shifting under the winds of representation.
9. Next, I discuss a specific artistic genre: cyberpunk. I
have chosen this particular branch of contemporary science fiction for the three
fundamental vectors of analysis it offers. The first vector is the image of
the human body itself. The second vector is also that of body images, but it
is focussed on technologically produced images. The third vector is the new
techno-social and political persona of human beings. I will try to examine these
phenomena by using art, and specifically the art of science fiction. If I have
chosen this literary genre, it is not only because by its very nature, it observes
and analyses the impact of technology on society, but also, above all, because
it is nothing less than the reflection of our present imaginary. Science fiction
operates by projecting into the future the society in which it exists, often
magnifying this society's fundamental social issues at the same time. Science
fiction acts like a microscope on the society from which it springs. And what
cyberpunk proposes of our society, the implosion of the human body, is exactly
what I believe to be our present state of being. What is cyberpunk? How can
we define this artistic movement? The term itself was used for the first time
by Bruce Bethke as the title of a story he published in Amazing Stories
in November 1984 (Shiner,18). The term was popularized later that same year
by a Washington Post journalist named Gardner Dozois, in a 30 December
1984 article entitled "Sf in the Eighties" (see Shiner 18). Whereas, when it
was coined, this term more precisely defined the works of "new" science-fiction
writers such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, it has since taken on much
wider reach. Although today the term is less popular than it was several years
ago it still tends to define a whole section of contemporary art. Cyberpunk
art includes films as well as books, visual art and music.
10. But what exactly are cyberpunks? What do they represent?
What is their discourse? These are not simple questions. My jumping-off point
is the introduction to the cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades written by
Bruce Sterling, the movement's unofficial spokesman: "Technology itself has changed. Not for us the giant steamsnorting
wonders of the past: The Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the nuclear
power plant. Eighties tech sticks to the skin, responds to the touch: the personal
computer, the Sony Walkman, the portable telephone, the soft contact lens. Certain
central themes spring up repeatedly in cyberpunk. The theme of body invasion:
prosthetic limb, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration.
The even more powerful theme of brain invasion: brain-computer interfaces, artificial
intelligence, neurochemistry -- techniques radically redefining the nature of
humanity, the nature of the self. ¼ The cyberpunks, being hybrids themselves,
are fascinated by interzones" (Sterling 1986, xii-xiii).
11. Let me push these definitions by Bruce Sterling and Veronica
Hollinger even further. Let us maintain that cyberpunk is not only a representation
of the identification of man and machine, that it is not only a discourse on
interzones (and on hybridization) but that it is, in fact, an actual manifesto
on entanglement. For a cyberpunk, existence can only be understood in a sort
of shared multiple territory in which biology, technology, and the cultural
all interact. For a cyberpunk, a living being is not defined by its individuality
-- that is to say by the materiality of his physical and cognitive borders --
but by its ability to project and multiply himself.
12. If cyberpunk is a genre, what then are its common narrative
themes? Cyberpunk fictions anticipate. They tend to choose a moment in the more
or less near future as the site of their narration (maybe fifty to one hundred
years from now). A rather typical cyberpunk fiction would illustrate, in this
near future, a chaotic society, governed by a swarms of street gangs, multinational
corporations and mercenaries living together in a shaky peace in mega-cities
whose size is that of a state or a region (Gibson's "Sprawl" for example, is
a city that extends from Boston to Atlanta). Generally, a cyberpunk city contains
both extreme material poverty and high-tech apparatus (often in the same place,
hence the name cyber/punk). But, for cyberpunks, technology is not the exclusive
domain of the dominant classes. On the contrary, cyberpunks perceive technology
(transformed or pirated) as basically subversive, always potentially "corruptible"
by "the Street" to ends not foreseen by those in power (whomever they may be).
For cyberpunks, technology is liberating; it permits one both to survive and to gain access to spheres of economic power. Furthermore, the technologies that
appear in these fictions are not the expensive, desk-bound symbols of social
success. Rather, just as Bruce Sterling explains below, these machines are generally
supple, plastic, popular, deeply mingled with the human body, at once "wetware,"
"software," and "hardware." In this literary genre, technology has begun to
melt on and into human beings; it is in the process of "biologization." For
cyberpunks, entanglement is seen as a living convergence of both the biological
and the technological:
13. In the future, computers will mutate beyond recognition.
Computers won't be intimidating, wire-festooned, high-rise bit-factories swallowing
your entire desk. They will tuck under your arm, into your valise, into your
kid's backpack. After that, they'll fit into your face, plug into your ear.
And after that -- they'll simply melt. They'll become fabric. What does a computer
really need? Not glass boxes -- it needs threads -- power wiring, glass fiber-optics,
cellular antennas, microcircuitry. These are woven things. Fabric and air and
electronic and light. Magic handkerchiefs with global access. You'll wear them
around your neck. You'll make tents from them if you want. They will be everywhere,
throwaway. Like denim. Like paper. Like a child's kite (Sterling and Gibson
<http://fbox.vt.edu:10021/J/jfoley/gibson/sterling_gibson_nas_speeches.txt>).
14. As technology becomes more biological, cyberpunks are
capable of conceiving of information technology (be it computers, artificial
intelligence, the world wide web, the internet, etc.) as fundamental and even
founding elements of both cultural and biological dynamics. In this artistic
genre's novels and films, technology controls the narration, it lies at the
core of it, characters are born by and through it -- living, dying and being
reborn in it. In the cyberpunk genre, all life incubates in technology.
15. In these fictions, information technologies and their
networks symbolize the matrix (in both its biological and technological meaning),
the Grail, the locus of all resolutions. In it breathe redemption, understanding,
and fortune. For cyberpunks, technology is truly the post-biological future: "Someday you're gonna come into a room, and you're gonna see this funny-looking
thing, a piece of flesh clutching into naked console, and you're gonna stop
and stare, because you won't be sure where the flesh stops and the chips and
circuit begin. They'll be, like, melted into each other, and some of the console'll
be as alive as flesh and some of the flesh'll be as dead as console, and that'll
be me. All of that'll be me" (Cadigan 1991, 214 <http://www.wmin.ac.uk/~fowlerc/patcadigan.html>).
As a consequence of this, the idea of the cyborg -- which I will analyse later
on -- must emerge within cyberpunk fictions since it portrays perfectly
the post-biological entanglement of wetware and hardware.
16. Aside from their discourse, beyond their political, aesthetic,
and technological structures, the cyberpunks lead one to the following thought:
We resemble Kafka's Gregor Samsa -- fragmented, multiplied, "schizophrenic"
(in the sense of the separation of ego and body) and imploded in a making of
a world that we cannot understand in its entirety. There may be a reason (or
reasons) for our "metamorphoses," they may mean something, but in the implosion
of our actual definitions of life, it is hard (and maybe impossible) to truly
apprehend them. Because they are influenced by these ontological desynchronizations
and breakdowns, cyberpunk fictions propose both a celebration of organic
technology and an attack on living flesh. Sexuality is very frequently the cyberpunk
expression of this wish, having become little more than pornography and prostitution.
For cyberpunks, technology leads equally to life and to death.
It is both utopia and dystopia, surface and abyss. And so, cyberpunk protagonists
experience their sexuality outside of all romantic representation. In the majority
of cyberpunk works, from Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy, and Cadigan's
Synners and Mindplayers, to the films Lawnmower Man and
Demolition Man, it is no longer possible to make love unless one is absorbed
in cyberspace, immersed in an antiseptic immateriality totally freed of any
links to our species evolutionary needs. Furthermore, in a number of cyberpunk
novels, the "normal" body is literally considered to be "a piece of meat." Not
only does it undergo the entropy of the material world, but it also appears
too confined to its (organic) space and time to be of any use. The organic body
spoken of by cyberpunk authors is a body that is not supple enough to integrate
into itself the dynamics necessary to be an effective "player" in the cyberpunk
society. The meat-body is a too-human, too biological body, a body that is too
easily limited and defined, a body whose only possible future is putrefaction: "-- It's a cheval. -- Very good, class. 'A mindless,
soulless, sexless shell, genderless as a baby-doll,' she said to me -- at me
-- whoever she was talking to, it wasn't me. She didn't believe I existed. -- 'A crisp new brain without a tenant. A bottle to be filled by one of us, empty
brass waiting to be turned into a bullet. A shiny new horse to be offered to
the desperate Horseman, in the vain hope that he or she will prefer it over
the nearest infantry grunt. A domestic animal bred and broken for one of us
to ride'" (Bull 101).
17. For cyberpunks, the body has no biological integrity of
its own, being a territory on and in which diverse dynamics coexist. A cyberpunk,
therefore, does not see himself as an entity; nor does he see himself as a duality.
A cyberpunk sees himself as an incomprehensible multiplicity. For a cyberpunk,
the body is a egg-body (in Deleuze's words), that is to say, a complexity of
diverse and multiple elements that both warrants a presence in the material
universe and dilutes consciousness into an infinite number of dynamics (hence
is quantum-like state). In the cyberpunk universe, the body (the whole body)
is a schizophrenic construct; its identity is a centerless amalgam of informational
systems (such as DNA, viruses, genes, memes, etc.). In the cyberpunk model of
the body the homogenous whole is replaced by a supple and permeable mosaic,
one whose selfhood is diffuse; the whole is only a series of heterogeneous elements
grafted to one-another. This means that the cyberpunk protagonist sees his body
as alien. For him, the body that he inhabits carries neither his
essence nor his materiality, rather, it plays host to a multiplicity
of other, often parasitic, presences (a phenomenon well-illustrated in many
science-fiction films, such as the Alien trilogy): "He spread his awareness out cautiously. It was like being
in many places at once, taking the information that came at the speed of light
and working in nanoseconds as matter-of-factly as he had worked in minutes and
hours to shape it into something understandable for himself. He was already
accustomed to the idea of having multiple awareness and a single concentrated
core that were both the essence of self. The old meat organ would not have been
able to cope with that kind of reality, but out here he appropriated more capacity
the way he once might have exchanged a smaller shirt for a larger one" (Cadigan
1991, 325 <http://www.wmin.ac.uk/~fowlerc/patcadigan.html>).
18. The question of the body is thus essential to all cyberpunk
works. What "unity," what form to ascribe to it? What identity must we imagine
for it: biological, technological, or cultural? How are we to resolve the schizophrenia
inherent in its multiplicity? In short, what intelligibility are we to propose?
Cyberpunk fiction evokes an altered existence where living bodies melt into
machines and their networks. The structures of societies are of less concern
to cyberpunks than the unity of the human being. For a cyberpunk, the human
"ego" has social presence only when woven into a multiple body in which technology,
"virality" and culture coexist. Yet strangely, while the cyberpunk protagonist
perceives his body as a multiplied system, this multiplicity carries with it
a return to unity. But this unity is not that of the human being, it is of the
techno-organic. In his fragmentation and multiplicity, the cyberpunk discovers
that he belongs to a whole in which he is but one of the founding elements.
What does this say to us? The model of the body proposed here is one en abime,
a quantum model, a model that is incomprehensible as a whole. Thus, cyberpunks
do not claim the disappearance of representation itself, but the impossibility
of its global comprehension. We can understand this new model, but we can only
do it partially since that model entails a mise en abime between the
individual and the collective. The physical body still exists, but just as with
the egg-body, it exists only as a multiple biological, technical, and cultural
construct free of all histories (be they temporal, causal, and/or biological).
Just like a bee in the hive, the body is only a piece of the collective behaviors,
attitudes and reactions: "Bodiless we swerve into chrome's castle of ice. And
we're fast. It feels like we're surfing the crest of an invading program, hanging
ten above the seething glitch systems as they mutate. We're sentient patches
of oils swept along down corridors of shadow. Somewhere we have bodies, very
far away, in a crowded loft roofed with steel and glass" (Gibson 1986, 173).
Thus, what can one say about the human body? What model can one imagine in relation
to its schizophrenic and quantum-like structures, what representation can one
suggests in relation to its constant mise en abime?
19. According to Scott Bukatman, Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker,
Alvin Toffler, and David Cooks, to "exist" socially a human being must become
information media (just like a cyberpunk protagonist). This means that one must
be able to become a chunk of information, easily carried and spread by technological
networks. According to these authors, human beings faced with today's technocultural
environments can only define themselves as informational structures: one's identity
could then only exist as binary language). Bukatman gives a name to this phenomenon;
he calls it Terminal Identity (69) (in the equivocal sense of "final,"
"deadly," and "depot." As in Bukatman's model, in many of today's models of
human beings, identity can exist outside of the biological framework and can
reside in technological networks. This does not mean that there will be no more
bodies (there will be, on the contrary, more bodies as the definition
of life will take on a multitude of dimensions). It means that these bodies
will only be provisionally biological. This is not a model of a denatured
body, but rather one of an over-natured body, i.e., a body whose definition
cannot exclude technology (this, of course, is the idea already developed by
authors such as Pierre Lévy, Gregory Stock, and Kevin Kelly). Over-naturing
is, in a way, the intrusion of the cultural into the model of life.This intrusion
proposes a pattern of over-materialization (the body being multiple and plastic,
being several bodies [i.e. several forms, several places, several owners] at
once). In the terminal identity model, for example, "identity" is projected
into several bodies. If it still implodes into the meshes of the network for
example, it is no less present in the physical world (although in a different
way). In fact, it now exists in greater and greater numbers (for it is now present
in living bodies, computer terminals, infospheres, etc.). And it is from this
multitude that an entanglement (an over-naturing) is inevitable. An entanglement
that produces the cyborg.
20. Through its "natural" over-materialization, the cyborg
questions both the fundamental characteristics of what it means to be human
and the boundaries of that same humanity. The cyborg is thus an essential concept,
suggesting both a representation adapted to technoculture, and the "end" of
organic identity. The idea represented by the cyborg is not simply that of the
amalgam or entanglement. The cyborg suggests a fundamental, but certainly definitive
change in representation, for if one uses the model of the cyborg, one must
then abandon the classic biological model (since the cyborg is founded on the
idea of fusion, where biology and technology are inseparable from one another).
Using the model of the cyborg, the human becomes an Other. In fact, the concept
of the cyborg represents not only biology's leap toward post-biology, but it
also represents the irremediable leap of technology towards biology. After the
cyborg, "normal" living things are no longer possible. The cyborg is the egg-body,
the perfectly and totally entangled body, the body that only the social and
cultural consensus can define (since it is impossible, because of the "perfection"
of its entanglement, to determine whether it is alive or not, whether it is
artificial or natural, human or machine: "The body must become a cyborg to retain
its presence in the world, resituated in technological space and refigure in
technological terms. Whether this presence represents a continuation, a sacrifice,
a transcendence, or a surrender of `the subject' is not certain" (Bukatman 247).
And Jameson: "My implication is that we ourselves, the human subjects
who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution; there
has been a mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation
in the subject. We do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this
new hyperspace, as I will call it, in part because our perceptual habits were
formed in that older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism.
The newer architecture, therefore -- like many of the other cultural products
I have evoked in the preceding remarks -- stands as something like an imperative
to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable,
perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions" (Jameson 1991, 38-39).
21. The concept of the cyborg presupposes a complexity that
surpasses the simple addition of physical or neural prostheses. The cyborg of
which we speak here is not a robot "built" of human flesh, it is the model of
a being with a fundamentally different kind of life. The cyborg is the signifier
of a definitive mutation. As the cyberpunks have shown, art's representations
of human beings are deeply changing. Let us now try to see exactly what these
new representations entail. The post-biological model suggests fundamental transformations
not only in the representation of the human body but also in that of human identity
-- human identity having always been defined, first and foremost, through its
biology. In the post-biological model, the basic question to be asked is not
that of the biological/ technological entanglement (since, if this entangling
is possible, and in several respects it already is, it will take place), but
that of the modelling itself. Post-biology is, in a way, the manifestation of
quantum representation. What exactly do I mean by that? When Fredric Jameson
proposes the transformation of the human body, when he suggests that the body's
phenomenology must adapt to new cultural spaces (such as post-modernism), when
he insists that it must "grow" new organs, he, in fact, suggests that we must
let go of the objectivity of the body. From now on, Jameson tells us, validity
belongs only to an unstable construct of the body and of life, a construct that
is produced in the shifting collection of dynamics (culture, biology, technology,
etc.). The cyborg spoken of by Bukatman, Jameson, and Haraway is in fact a culture-body,
i.e., a body constructed out of the impossibility of its objective material
definition. It is a weightless, yet moving body, always both signs and
referents. But even though the body becomes, at once, weightless and plastic,
it cannot be ignored. When we examine recent models of the body (including that
of the cyberpunks), we realize that the body is an unavoidable concept. All
of the fictions we have examined until now have proposed at least one
body for human beings (either virtual, cyborganic, mechanic, informational,
biological, etc.). The body is thus, even in the most over-materialized representations
of technoculture, a primeval model of the world.
22. But it is also important to note here that the body is,
simultaneously, the original disappearanceof the world: since one can
only conceive of it, and technoculture affirms this very clearly, in the ephemera
of cultural dynamics. An undeniable disjuncture has surfaced here. It is both
impossible to negate the body and to objectify it. The post-biological model
answers by emphasizing the weightlessness of the body. In post-biology, the
body is nothing more than an unstable construct, just as ungraspable as that
indefinable something between the hive and the bee. What does this mean? If
the body is always, and invariably an integral part of all possible models
and representation of human beings, and if it is always fundamentally
ungraspable, then we must bring the following analysis to bear: we are not moving
towards a virtual body, but towards a multiplication and an over-modelling of
it (the absence of stable and measurable definitions suggests a multiplication
of definitions) whose understanding exists only in a quantum-like state (i.e.,
one's observation of the body is bound to change that same body). Thus, observation
becomes a fundamental part of the body's ontology. However, as quantum mechanics
tells us, the observation itself can only be partial and can never grasp the
phenomenon observed in its entirety. Thus the body itself can only be partial
and its shape is always unstable.
23. Just like Kafka's Gregor Samsa, like Gibson's protagonists,
or like Haraway's cyborg, the body does not disappear. On the contrary, it is
more and more present but in a constant state of instability. The body does
not become any less human and any more technological, but something else that
is differently human and technological. It is not a case here of denaturing
and/or dehumanizing, but of over-definition: the body is constantly redefined
and has several definitions at once, all being produced by an infinite number
of observations (it is at once a biological system, an information processor,
a vehicle for genetic survival, a maker of machines, etc.). The body, through
its entanglement, its fragmentation, its plasticity and its schizophrenia no
longer belongs to the individual alone, but is owned, in both its construction
and intelligibility, by the technological society (which acts here as the observer).
The post-biological body is a body in the abyss between the social and the individual;
it is a body that slides and hesitates constantly between society and the individual;
it is a body that can only exists in someone's or something's observation of
the world. What this illustrates is the profound impact that technoculture has
on the definition of the body. The post-biological model is thus less a concept
than it is an actual transformation. Consequently, an objective measure of life
made without cultural dynamics is no longer possible. Life and the human body
are too rapidly and constantly redefined, re-evaluated, deconstructed then reconstructed
by technoculture (acting as the observer) to be able to give an independent
and absolute measure of it.
24. The model of life, it would appear, can only be adequately
read as slippage. The questions of where life, intelligence and consciousness
begin and end in the infinitely small and the infinitely great (for example,
where is the intelligence in a hive?) are questions that will possibly remain,
on the scientific level at least, unanswerable. They can only be taken up adequately
through a kind of wavering (both this and that, this or that); that is,
life can only be understood now through continual changes in definitions and
through the impossibility of repeating these definitions exactly (whence its
quantum-like characteristic), precisely because technology allows us to examine
and to explore these phenomena more and more carefully (the number of possible
observations being infinite). As Paul Verhoeven's Robocop has shown us
quite clearly, it is precisely because it is possible to implant various mechanisms
in the human body that it becomes more and more difficult to delimit what is
human and what is not. Today, the definition of life is quantum-like and fractal.
It wavers between finite and infinite and this wavering prevents us from defining
it clearly as a whole (since each definition gives us access to other models).
The cultural must now, openly, be part of the human equation since it, alone,
can form relatively supple models in instability and multiplicity. It is here
of course that such movements as postmodernism, cyberpunk and post-biology turn
out to be important for each of them includes in itself an over-defined observer
examining an unstable world (science, as the possibility of an objective and
repeatable measurement, is obviously not excluded from the equation, but can
only be included in it as entangled, synthesized and submitted). Cyberpunk and
postmodernism are unleashers of phenomena. It is they who, more and more, sculpt
the model of what we are. As Stanislas Lem so eloquently wrote on the last page
of Solaris, we are entering an age of "cruel miracles." In this age,
our body will become as fluid and as liquid as those of Robert Patrick in Terminator
2; receptacles of phenomena as diverse as life, representations and machine-made
consciousness. Our bodies will take on new forms and new meaning, disassembling,
at the same time, what we perceive as being ourselves. The human being is about
to disappear....
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