Escape Velocity (35 page)

In the final analysis, then, it is "primitive," humanist notions of what is natural and what is unnatural that are Orlan's true bete noire, not the sexist "standards of beauty imposed by our society." Her professed feminism and her manifest posthumanism cancel each other out: Those who declare war on "what is natural" are in no position to bemoan the unnatural "standards of beauty imposed by our society"; if the body is simply so much RAM (random-access memory) waiting to be overwritten with new data, one cut is as good as another. Beneath her politically expedient rhetoric about the evils of the beauty myth, Orlan conceals a not so secret dream: to be the art world's first posthuman celebrity. The artist, who has referred to herself as a "replicant" and who has observed, "I think the body is obsolete," seems primed for a cyborgian makeover, a metamorphosis into something out of Naomi Wolfs worst nightmares.

At the end of The Beauty Myth, Wolf warns that women are imperiled by their failure to understand that the Iron Maiden-the unnecessary fictions about the body beautiful that cage women's lives-has finally been uncoupled from the human frame of reference. "We still believe that there is some point where [cosmetic] surgery is constrained by a natural limit, the outline of the 'perfect' human female," she writes.

That is no longer true. The "ideal" has never been about the bodies of women, and from now on technology can allow the "ideal" to do what it has always sought to do: leave the female body behind altogether to clone its mutations in space. The human female is no longer the point of reference. The "ideal" has become at last fully inhuman. . . . Fifty million Americans watch the Miss America pageant; in 1989 five contestants . . . were surgically reconstructed by a single Arkansas plastic surgeon. Women are comparing themselves and young men are comparing young women with a new breed that is a hybrid

In other words, a morph. Perhaps, Wolf speculates, such creatures are only intimations of silicone-and silicon-sylphs to come. If this sounds like alarmist nonsense, consider Cindy Jackson, the living Barbie mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Jackson has embarked on a crusade "which evolved while assisting other women through Barbie-izations" to create "a bionic army," according to M. G. Lord."*^ "In Barbie's early years, Mattel struggled to make its doll look like a real-life movie star," writes Lord.

Today, however, real-life celebrities-as well as common folk-are emulating her. . . . pTJhere are already a lot of bionic women out there. "I don't even think I want to walk down the street in California," Cindy told me. "They've all done what I've done. Over there I'm just another Barbie doll."^^

Jackson, whose philosophy is founded on the principle that men "are really drawn to women for their looks," earnestly believes that surgery has given her "the perfect face and body."

Wolf is troubled by the growing sophistication of computer-enhanced photography "that will make 'perfection' increasingly surreal," and by menacing visions of "technologies that [will] replace the faulty, mortal female body, piece by piece, with the 'perfect' artifice.'"*^ Will this gyndroid have adjustable implants. Wolf wonders, that will allow her to instantaneously accommodate each partner's preference in breasts? In a posthuman, postfeminist future where "no self-respecting woman will venture outdoors without a surgically unaltered face," suggests Wolf, it will only be a matter of time before cosmetic surgeons "reposition the clitoris, sew up the vagina for a snugger fit, loosen the throat muscles, and sever the gag reflex. . . . The machine is at the door. Is she the future?'"*^

The Promises of Monsters^°

It is a profound irony that a "hybrid nonwoman"-albeit one utterly unlike Wolf s-is the central conceit of an essay hailed as a benchmark in feminist thought: Donna Haraway's enormously influential "A Cyborg Manifesto."

Haraway's argument turns on a progressive, feminist reading of the myth of the cyborg-a myth that is traditionally interpreted as a macho,

militarized response to forces that threaten accepted definitions of what it means to be male, even human. To Claudia Springer, a feminist critic of cyberculture, RoboCop and the Schwarzenegger Terminator express "nostalgia for a time when masculine superiority was taken for granted and an insecure man needed only to look at technology to find a metaphor for the power of phallic strength."^'

In addition, Hollywood's armored cyborgs, the remnants of their humanity impregnable behind heavy metal hardware, speak to a growing sense of human irrelevance in what is, more and more, a technological environment. The cultural critic Scott Bukatman sees, in RoboCop and the Terminator, "an uneasy but consistent sense of human obsolescence, and at stake is the very definition of the human. . . . [0]ur ontology is adrift."

To which Haraway replies, "The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics."" Unlike RoboCop and other pugnacious symbols of an embattled status quo, Haraway's cyborg is the personification of a future untroubled by ambiguity and difference. It reconciles mechanism and organism, culture and nature, Tomorrowland and Arcadia, simulacrum and original, science fiction and social reality in a single body. A Utopian monster, born of a "pleasure in . . . potent and taboo fusions" and "resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity," Haraway's cyborg is a living symbol of difference (sexual, ethnic, and otherwise) that refuses to be resolved or repressed.^'^

When Haraway declares that we are all cyborgs, she means it both literally-medicine has given birth to "couplings between organism and machine," bio- and communications technologies are "recrafting our bodies"-and figuratively, in the sense that "we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system."^^ In short, technology is reversing the polarities of the world we live in:

Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally-designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. ^^

In the eddies and vortices of these turbulent times, Haraway sees a historically unique opportunity for feminists to upset the balance of patriarchal power by "embracing the possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions" between the privileged term and its devalued opposite in the hierarchical dualisms "structuring the Western self "^^

To Haraway, the breaching, by science and technology, of boundaries between previously inviolable domains lines up neatly wdth contemporary academic thought-specifically, with poststructuralism, a school of literary theory and cultural analysis founded in France in the late sixties. According to poststructuralists. Western systems of meaning are underwritten by binary oppositions: body/soul, other/self, matter/spirit, emotion/ reason, natural/artificial, and so forth. Meaning is generated through exclusion: The first term of each hierarchical dualism is subordinated to the second, privileged one. Poststructuralism attempts to expose the artful dodge whereby philosophical hierarchies validate their standards of truth by invalidating their opposites.

To Haraway, cyberculture by its very nature challenges these dualisms. Technology's trespasses across the once-forbidden zone between the natural and the artificial, the organic and the inorganic render much of what we know-or thought we knew-provisional. The philosophical implication of these and other technical developments, she argues, is that the conceptual cornerstones of the Western worldview-the network of meanings "structuring the Western self-are fraught with cracks. Hammer blows in all the right places could bring the whole edifice tumbhng down, she theorizes.

But "A Cyborg Manifesto," in addition to being an indictment of the Western worldview, is also an unflinching critique of feminism-specifically, of feminist attitudes toward science and technology. Previous feminisms have attempted to subvert the oppressive binary oppositions mentioned earlier by inverting them, redeeming the discarded first term of each hierarchical dualism. Ecotopian feminism. New Age goddess feminism, and other strains of what Katha Pollitt has called "difference" feminism assert that emotion, nurturing, and other traits "inherent" in women, though culturally depreciated, are no less valid than the "male" attributes lauded by our society. Woman, here, is Mother Earth, tuned to the frequencies of nature (the body) rather than culture (the mind)-a creature of biology rather than technology, intuition rather than rationality.

Escape Velocity 245

But, says Haraway, neither nature nor the body exist anymore, in the Enhghtenment sense; both are irredeemably polluted, philosophically speaking, in an age of human babies with baboon hearts and genetically altered mice with human genes. The techno-logic of the late twentieth century, in concert with philosophies such as poststructuralism-which views nature, the body, and other previous givens as cultural constructions-"not only undermines the justifications for patriarchy but all claims for an organic or natural standpoint."^^ In other words, "It's not just that *god' is dead; so is the 'goddess.' "^^

Furthermore, she argues, in light of "the situation of women in a world so intimately restructured through the social relations of science and technology," feminism can ill afford "an anti-science metaphysics, a demon-ology of technology" that will condemn it to powerlessness.^^ Ballard put it succinctly: "Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute."^'

New Age, pagan, or Gaian feminists who conduct their critique of the technological society in spiritual terms overlook the obvious, everyday ways in which cyberculture negatively affects women's lives. What Haraway calls the "New Industrial Revolution" has exposed female laborers in the semiconductor industry and the women who assemble electronic components in their homes to toxic chemicals that cause chromosome damage, premature deliveries, and miscarriages. Moreover, as the Whole Earth Review writer Joan Howe notes, telecommuting, like many of this century's labor-saving innovations for the housewdfe, is proving to be more curse than blessing; housebound mothers of young children who earn extra cash at the home terminal through "routine clerical work and production typing" are working

even harder, since all the duties of the traditional housewife will still be there in addition to the opportunity (need) to earn a wage via computer networks. . . . Telework is technology's gift to conservatives, and bodes decidedly ill for feminists.^^

Coming to terms with the essentially cyborgian nature of life in cyberculture is therefore a prerequisite for the empowerment of feminists

who dream of a new world disorder. Technologies possess either repressive or liberatory potential, depending on who controls them, implies Haraway; to retain control of their physiologies and their destinies, women must abandon binary oppositions that demonize science and technology and deify nature. She writes.

Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. . . . Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.^^

Transgressions

Proceeding from Haraway's assumption that nature, human and otherwise, has become unnatural, feminist theorists have embarked on investigations of what Anne Balsamo calls "body transgressions"-inquiries into female bodybuilding, tattooing, and other "unnatural" acts that force us to reconsider our ideas about sex, gender, and humanity.^'*

"Inquiries" is perhaps too neutral a term here: Theories such as poststructuralism, which is dedicated to the demolition of hierarchies, are sometimes used in the service of agendas that merely invert those hierarchies. In such cases, what began as a refutation of "totalizing" ideologies-grand, unifying theories whose universality is achieved at the expense of intellectual diversity-becomes itself a general-purpose ideology whose facile corrective for all of our social ills is a resistance to fixed boundaries of any sort. "A Cyborg Manifesto," for example, is maddeningly short on practical politics for working-class borgs and disappointingly long on odes to "partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity"-as if such abstract qualities could mean anything, apart from the noise and dirt of everyday lives.^^

This dynamic is at work in uncritical celebrations of female bodybuilding, gender reassignment, and other body transgressions that give little thought to the problematic worldviews these activities sometimes represent. Such excesses abound in the postmodern theorist Arthur Kroker's fatuous rhapsodies about "electric flesh" and the "hyper-modern body." Here is an excerpt from a dizzy paean, coauthored with Marilouise Kroker, to a transsexual named Toni Denise:

Escape Velocity 247

She is not just a guy who warp jumped into a woman's body by surgical cuts, but the first of all the virtual bodies, that point where Disney World becomes flesh: a double movement involving the endless remaking of sexual identity and an abandonment of the (gendered) past.^^

To the Krokers, Toni Denise is Haraway's Utopian cyborg concretized, "a creature in a post-gender world."^^ She is the "perfect tran-sexual [sic] woman," oscillating between her identity as "a man-made woman" and a "man who could say no to cellulite, and yes to silicon [sic] breasts."^^ But as Stuart Ewen and Naomi Wolf have convincingly argued, far too many women are already "man-made" in mind and body. And the Disney World futurism of silicone breasts is lost on women whose bodies and lives bear the scars of Dow Corning implants.

If we knew more about the day-to-day existence of Toni Denise (we are told only that she "works" the drag queen bars of Tallahassee, Florida), we might be able to read the stories written in those "surgical cuts." Unfortunately, the psychological, sociological, and economic factors that have made her what she is are lost in cyberbole about "warp jump[s]," "virtual bodies," and "gender signs turn[ed] inside out"; she has been transformed from an actual being in a social body to a virtual ride in an academic theme park. In his critique of the body language of Krokerian postmodernism, Scott Bukatman writes,