Escape Velocity (34 page)

Discorporation of this sort is not uncommon in cyberculture, where growing numbers spend their days in "static observation mode," scrolling through screenfuls of data. Bit by digital bit, we are becoming alienated from our increasingly irrelevant bodies, a sense of discorporation captured in the performance artist Laurie Anderson's quip, "I am in my body the way most people drive their cars."^^ With this alienation comes a

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body loathing, a combination of mistrust and contempt for the cumbersome flesh that accounts for the drag coefficient in technological environments. "We are now entering a colonialist phase in our attitudes to the body, full of paternalistic notions that conceal a ruthless exploitation carried out for its own good," declares Ballard. "Will the body at last rebel, tip all those vitamins, douches and aerobic schedules into Boston harbor and throw off" the colonialist oppressor?"^ ^

David Cronenberg, our foremost theoretician of viral sex and "uncontrollable flesh," takes up Ballard's thread. "I don't think that the flesh is necessarily . . . evfl," says Cronenberg, "[but it] is cantankerous, and it is independent. ... It really is like colonialism. The colonies suddenly decide that they can and they should exist with their own personality and should detach from the control of the mother country. ... I think that the flesh in my films is like that."^"* In his movie The Brood (1979), patients at Dr. Raglan's cultish Psychoplasmics Institute are taught to bring their neuroses and psychoses to the surface-literally, in the form of stigmata. The results are not always promising. A distraught graduate of the institute bares his chest to reveal grotesque tumors. "It's a form of cancer of the lymphatic system," he explains, through gritted teeth. "Raglan encouraged my body to revolt against me and it did. Now I have a small revolution on my hands and I'm not putting it down very successfully."

The antipathy between mind and body is implicit in the metaphysical riddle at the heart of the human condition-that we simultaneously have bodies and are bodies, that our flesh is both "it" and "I." Northrop Frye writes, "Human consciousness feels that it is inside a body it knows next to nothing about, even such elementary facts as the circulation of the blood being relatively recent discoveries. Hence it cannot feel that the body is identical with consciousness."^^

At the same time, the software of our minds is maddeningly dependent on the hardware that houses it, our bodies. Body loathing arises, in part, from the terrible unfairness of the body's planned obsolescence. Says Cronenberg,

Many of the peaks of philosophical thought revolve around the impossible duality of mind and body. . . . The basis of horror-and difficulty in life in general-is that we cannot comprehend

how we can die. Why should a healthy mind die, just because the body is not healthy? There seems to be something wrong with that.^^

Sometimes, of course, body loathing simply speaks to the fact that the body can be, well, loathsome. "Who has not felt at times the 'foulness' of the body and the desire to shake it off?" asks Bruce Mazlish, a philosopher of science. "Has not felt revulsion at the 'base' necessity of bowel movements, or perhaps even of sex?"^^

The Christian worldview that underwrites Western culture overlays this physical disgust with a moral revulsion. D. H. Lawrence, who believed that "the greatest, most deeply rooted enemy of sensual life is Christianity," blamed St. Paul, taking the apostle to task for his "emphasis on the division of body and spirit, and his belief that the flesh is the source of corruption."^^

Yet, long-lived though it may be, body loathing rises to a crescendo in cyberculture, where these influences seem poised to sever mind from body, once and for all. "In the present condition we are uncomfortable halfl^reeds, part biology, part culture, with many of our biological traits out of step with the inventions of our minds," asserts the artificial intelligence theorist Hans Moravec.^^

Recent military accidents involving "friendly fire" provide sobering proof of Moravec's claim. Computerized weapons technology demands human operators capable of processing information and making decisions at superhuman speeds, says Captain Phil Bozzelli, the commander of the USS Valley Forge. "We are putting a lot of pressure on decision makers, and those who support them, to be infallible," he notes. "And the human body isn't ready to be infallible."^^ In 1994, when American fighter planes shot down two U.S. Army helicopters over northern Iraq, killing all on board, the retired army lieutenant colonel Charles R. Shrader took up Bozzelli's refrain: "Modern technology has simply evolved so fast and in so many different ways that it is overtaxing human capacities," he told the New York Times.^^

Meanwhile, on the philosophical battlefields of the academy, traditional perceptions of the body and the self are under attack by contemporary feminist theory. Because women have so often been reduced to

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objectified flesh throughout Western history, feminists have a vested interest in body politics. Since the early eighties, academic inquiries into the extent to which our knowledge of the body is culturally produced, rather than naturally determined, have proliferated, giving rise to a branch of scholarship that Judith Allen and Elizabeth Grosz call "corporeal feminism."^^

According to the feminist theorist Anne Balsamo, feminists attempting to grapple with "the cultural construction of the gendered body" in cyberculture have had to come to terms with science and technology in a way that their precursors did not:

An earlier feminist criticism that condemned science and technology as masculinist cults of rationality has given way to a serious engagement with a cluster of related questions that concern not only the development of new sciences and the deployment of new technologies (genetic engineering, for example), but also the philosophical frameworks that structure the social organization of the production of truth and knowledge."

Contemplating the unlucky conjunction of technology and the female body in the information age, feminists as diverse as Naomi Wolf and Donna Haraway are challenging deep-seated ideas about the body in general and the female body in specific. Wolf, the best-selling advocate of a pro-capitalist "power feminism," and Haraway, a socialist-feminist historian of science, are spearheading mainstream and academic critiques that shatter the image of the body in cyberculture.

Build Me a Woman

Some girls wander by mistake into the mess that scalpels make —Leonard Cohen^'*

Time and again, patriarchal culture has brought technology to bear on women's bodies in the service of male fantasies: The corset produced the heaving bosom of romance novels even as it hindered respiration, restricted

mobility, and rearranged the internal organs; the bustle thrust the buttocks up and back, approximating "the posture of a female animal in heat."^^

The remodeling of the female body in accordance with bourgeois ideals did not end with the passing of the corset and the bustle. The consumer culture of industrial modernity merely emphasized the economic subtext of such practices. In the 1920s, writes Stuart Ewen, advertising educated American women "to look at themselves as things to be created competitively against other women: painted and sculpted with the aids of the modern market."^^

In The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women, Naomi Wolf indicts the unattainable ideal promulgated by the beauty industry-a pernicious fantasy that has made crash dieting, eating disorders, cosmetic surgery, and the onset of a chronic self-loathing rites of passage for too many American women. In cyberculture, notes Wolf, digital systems have enabled the creation of truly posthuman paragons of beauty: the impossibly flawless models in ads and fashion layouts in women's magazines exist only as digitized photos, retouched with computer graphics software. "Airbrushing age from women's faces is routine" even in general interest publications, she reports, and "computer imaging . . . has been used for years in women's magazines' beauty advertising" to remake reality to corporate dictates. This issue, she contends,

is not trivial. It is about the most fundamental freedoms: the freedom to imagine one's own future and to be proud of one's own life. ... to airbrush age off a woman's face is to erase women's identity, power, and history.^^

Inverting the relationship between replica and original, this unreality fosters a postmodern psychosis. "As frozen, photogenic images-in ads or style magazines-become models from which people design . . . themselves, extreme alienation sets in," writes Ewen. "One becomes, by definition, increasingly uncomfortable in one's own skin."^^

The union of computer technologies with Wolfs beauty myth may one day spawn creatures not unlike Pris, the Pleasure Model android in the movie Blade Runner. Cosmetic surgeons have already begun using computer programs to create previews of postop results by manipulating a patient's

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digitized photo. According to an article in the San Francisco Examiner, "The elusive 'perfect face' has been quantified and put into a computerized 'facial template.' By comparing a patient's face with the template, doctors can determine which features need correction."^'^

The process inspired Brian D'Amato's Beauty, a roman a clef about the messy collision of postmodernism, plastic surgery, and the beauty myth, set in the New York art world. In D'Amato's novel, an artist's obsession with Renaissance portraiture bears strange fruit: In an avant-garde surgical process, Jamie Angelo peels off his girlfriend's face and replaces it with synthetic skin on which he sculpts a countenance worthy of a quattrocento beauty, based on a computer composite of the most exquisite features in art history. The plot takes a ghoulish turn when things begin to go horribly wrong with Angelo's not-yet-ready-for-prime-time handiwork.

"We're closer to the era of total-reconstruction surgery than people think," says D'Amato. "The same computer-imaging techniques described in Beauty are already in use in plastic surgery clinics all over the world. . . . When the type of surgery described in Beauty becomes available, there will be people out there who will want to push the edge of the envelope.'"*^

In a poetic sense, vanguard artists are already applying postmodern quotation to human anatomy. The role of computer imaging in creating ideals of beauty, and in the surgical revision of living tissue in accordance with those ideals, is addressed in what the National Review art critic James Gardner calls the "Art of the Body," a nineties redux of seventies body art. Riding the crest of this latest wave is the French performance artist Orlan.

Nowhere do body politics, the avant-garde's imperative to shock, and the pathologies of a culture drowning in images and obsessed with appearances come together more arrestingly, or disturbingly, than in Or-lan's operating theater. Since 1990, she has undergone cosmetic surgery seven times as part of The Ultimate Masterpiece: The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, a "carnal art" work-in-progress designed to transform her face into a collage of famous features. Her surgeons' hands are guided by a "facial template" assembled from digitized details of famous paintings. The composite face has Mona Lisa's forehead; the eyes of Gerome's Psyche; the nose of a Diana attributed to the School of Fontainebleau; the mouth of Boucher's Europa; and the chin of Botticelli's Venus.

240 Mark Dery

Each operation is a performance: The patient, surgeon, and attending personnel wear haute couture scrubs, designed in one instance by Paco Rabanne, and the operating room is decorated with crucifixes, plastic fruit, and outsized placards displaying the production's "credits" in the kitschy style of fifties movie posters. Given only local anesthesia, Orlan acts less like a patient than a director on the set; during a 1993 operation in New York, she read from a book on psychoanalysis and interacted by phone or fax with viewers around the globe watching a live video transmission of the event via satellite. "I will stop my work when it is as close as possible to the computer composite," she informed a New York Times reporter."*' Her self-objectification is instructive: By "it," she means her body, which is synonymous in her case with "my work."

Whether Orlan's surgical performances are carnal art or carnival art is a matter of debate. The critic and curator Barbara Rose contends that the artist is acting out "the madness of a demand for an unachievable physical perfection"; Gardner maintains that she is merely a particularly noxious example of "the French obsession with refinement and feminine beauty.""*^ Orlan insists that she is a feminist; her art, she writes, "brings into question the standards of beauty imposed by our society ... by using the process of plastic surgery to a different end than the usual patient does"-although how the rearrangement of her face in the image of an idealized Renaissance femininity constitutes such a critique is unclear."*^ Her characterization of the experience of going under the knife as "cathartic" would not sound out of place on the lips of a plastic surgery addict.

Then, too, there is the sticky business of her self-promotion: A seasoned mediamonger, she repeats surefire sound bites ("i have given my BODY FOR ART," "THE BODY IS BUT A COSTUME") and wraps gore, glamour, and the ever popular image of the eccentric artist in a mediagenic package. "I'm the artist who has gone the furthest," she claims, in a press release. Like all great media manipulators, she blurs the line, a la Salvador Dali, between art and advertising, product and public image (the Times called her private life "a carefully constructed cipher"). She sometimes appears in photographs dressed as the baroque "St. Orlan," a sobriquet reminiscent of the surrealist's preferred title, "the Divine Dali," and she out-Dalis Dali by literally becoming her own commodity: The fat removed during her operations is on sale in petri dishes dubbed "reliquaries."

In a written interview, Orlan sums up her philosophy in fractured Enghsh. "Orlan wants to fight against . . . the inborn, against DNA," she writes. Religion and psychoanalysis maintain that "we must accept ourselves [as we are]. . . . But [in an age] of genetic manipulation, this is a primitive outlook.'"*"*