The Presence of the Body between the Organic and the Artificial

I.

One of the most interesting chapters of the novel L'Eve Future (1866) is the one in which the scientist and electrician Edison explains the basic principles and the functional organization of his creation. The replacement for the moody and capricious Ms. Alicia Clairy is the female android named Hadaly - a model of classical automaton. With her body, sensitivity and pneuma based on mechanic principles, she is restored to life by electricity – more precisely, by the miniature electromagnetic engines which enable the functioning of her nervous system. In this chapter, Edison also reveals what he refers to as the »moral postulates« - the true reasons for his creating this android, which can even be interpreted as the philosophical foundation of his understanding of the woman and that of the necessity for her to be artificially replaced. »Indeed, if one could somehow retrospectively perceive the positive beginnings of his beloved, and be confronted with her initial form as she first moved, I think that most lovers would feel their passion shattering into a feeling that combines the Gloomy, the Absurd and even the Unimaginable. A female android, however, produces none of the terrible impressions caused by the sight of the life process governing our organisms, not even at the very beginning of her existence. Everything in her is rich and well-conceived.«[1]

Without the shadow of a doubt, the artificial is deeply inscribed in our understanding of the physical (we could say that techne has always been part of the organic). Especially in modernity, however, the artificial serves as a basis for different modes of aesthetic and scientific production of physical images, strategies of bodily representation etc. The ways of shaping the body's visibility, transparency, organization, functionality, borders (including those of the human being), and various kinds of its »long-term administration«[2] reveal themselves through the aesthetic mediation present in the organic/technological relationship  in which science and art participate in the production of the bodily image, and forming its geography and place. I would like to use the concept of the female android Hadaly, especially as presented in the aforementioned quotation, as my starting point in dealing with some problems that relate to the gender body, especially the female one as present in the organic/technological relationship. I would like to show that these problems constitute a part of the broader field of modernity, and that the relation  of modernity towards the female body should actually be viewed from the perspective which Rosi Braidotti defined as the »fundamental assimetry between the mainstream and the feminist reading of modernity.”[3]

What is actually so striking in Edison’s words that they can be used as a starting point for exploring the reflection of the female body in the organic/technological relationship? Let's suppose it contains the "postulate" of the central paradox that has always accompanied the modern concept of the female body and its artificial replacements - machines, automata, androids, robots, and various contemporary avatars with cyber prefixes. Besides the fact that Edison's creation could be interpreted as a confirmation of the creator's (that is, man's) power and authority (with the artificial woman symbolizing a perfect embodiment of patriarchal wish for a female being harmonic in structure, functional in its operativity, obeying, graceful, beautiful, and reduced in her perfection to some basic principles), there is another important aspect to consider. In psychoanalysis, it constitutes a part of »das Unheimliche«, with the female android symbolizing an image of threatening hybridity and the uncertainty it brings along. According to Alfred Jentsch, whom Freud considered his forerunner in the research of »das Unheimliche«, the cause for the appearance of »das Unheimliche« lies precisely in the dilemma whether a being is actually alive or not. Needless to say, Freud further develops this notion with the problem of the gaze and blindness connected with Oedipal fear, but that is not really our point of interest. The real question is: how come that, throughout the history of modernity, the fearfull hybridity between the technological and the organic is mainly symbolized by artificial woman? How come that, even if reduced and completely emptied, female nature remains, with the entire range of its elusive power? Why does the aesthetic and scientific imagination place the woman's body precisely upon the point that discloses the basic fear of the artificial, the point where the artificial strikes back and the horror of body engineering discloses the distopian side of modern progress as well that of the autonomy of the subject? Even with the strongest intention to produce an artificial woman as the result of total administration an pure aesthetisation, there is always fear present that the venture will not be a successful one. The fear of the body-overdose (even in a form so purified) drives men, especially infatuated lovers, to madness and death.

Let us now return to my initial quotation of Edison and try to analyse the »postulate« which could reveal his philosophical basis and possibly answer the questions I have just brought up. The main postulate on which Edison's female android is based is that, from the very beginning of her artificial life, Hadaly has actually been expelled from nature: she »produces none of the terrible impressions caused by the sight of the life process governing our organisms, not even at the very beginning of her existence. Everything in her is rich and well-conceived.«[4] She has never been part of nature and life, symbolizing a pure denial of the fearful unpredictability and ambiguity of nature. Everything inside her is well-organized; as L'Isle Adam shows, she can even be opened (dissected) without arousing horror – only pure satisfaction and admiration on the part of spectators when faced with the harmonious organization of this creature. The trait of »being expelled from nature« was also characteristic of the images of artificial women conceived in earlier times, e.g. for those of the Romantic period – of Hoffmann's Olympia or Kleist's notion of marionette. Olympia discloses the distance from nature in the perfection of her rhythm, and Kleists's marionette in its abstract grace which, naturally, makes her surpass the body of any human actor or dancer.[5]

We can also read this separateness in the prevailing modern phantasies about the body's disappearance as inherent in the rationalist foundation of modernity. The departure from nature could be defined as a consequence of the “evacuation of consciousness from the world”[6], with consciousness occupying the position over and above nature, including above that of the body, and thus parading as “the prerequisite for founding any knowledge.”[7] The illusion of the disappearing body seems to promise the achievement of autonomous subjectivity – separate, self-sufficient as to its reflexivity (representability), in other words, the subjectivity that will finally be liberated from its dark, irrational, biological, unclassifiable, and unhierarchical limits and determinations. More precisely, what seems to be so alluring in this new technological reality is the illusive possibility for us to transcend the most troublesome and traumatic limitation that has always pursued and threatened the rationalist argumentation of modern subjectivity: the fact that man has always been but part of unpredictable nature, and has thus inevitably been defined as a “transient structure with limited capacity for adaptation and achievement.”[8] The same attitude towards the body is shared by a number of contemporary post-modern theorists and artists who, along with the development of high technology, further radicalise the modified concepts of materiality, and the body itself. The body is becoming obsolete, a thing denoted as incompetent, dysfunctional, unreliable, inefficient, a loser compelled to eventually surrender the battle with machinery, after having lost the one with the Descartesian mind.[9] “Technology was invented only to hide the terrible secret of our decaying bodies.”[10] The disappearance and replacement of the body in the scope of the all-embracing technological reality can also be understood as a direct consequence of one of the two poles constituting modernity as defined by Bruno Latour – that of purification which constantly differentiates between “two distinctive ontological zones, i.e. between the human on the one side and the non-human on the other.”[11] To put it differently: purification is yet another name for the radical boundary thinking »which always leaves out the body to develop the mind.«[12] The main characteristic of the body as viewed through the prism of boundary thinking is that, undergoing the anatomic, scientific, aesthetic and technological procedures imposed upon it by purification, the body is gradually becoming a place of non-life, a plain object of scientific interest and that of representation, and finally[13] - a discursive, binary net. According to Latour, however, the notion of modernity can not be imagined without the other pole he defines as »traduction« - "the mixing of genres present as something entirely novel, a hybrid between nature and culture."[14] The understanding of modernity (and accordingly, that of post-modern reality) is only possible if one considers the co-existence of both these praxes - one governed, however, by the paradoxical fact that "the more forbidden it is to think of hybrids, the more realizable they become."[15] The attitude modernity displays towards the body, especially the strong wish for the body to become pure and empty,[16] may not necessarily have a happy ending. The prospect of a remodulated, recultivated and reformed body is threatened by the unpredictable and ambiguous character of hybrid mutations. This kind of standpoint can also account for the contemporary opposition to genetic technology, cloning, or biotechnology.[17] Thus, we could say that modernity inevitably reflects the body within the dialectics between the utopian and the distopian.

Especially interesting in this specific history of modernity, however, is the fact that the woman's body will always be situated on the distopian side.[18] Testifying to this fact are the history of modern understanding of artificial woman, and the interpretation of the female body in relation to technology in general. The desire for a disciplined, non-living, eliminated woman's body has always been accompanied by the fear of the revival of its demonic nature; if revived, this nature will escape any kind of regulation. The consequences of this kind of attitude also come to light if we consider the aesthetic and cultural images of the female body in relation to the processes of modernisation and technological development in the 20th century. We should be especially careful with the theories that modernisation had a positive influence on woman's liberation in terms of new strategies for unrestrained movement, new geography, working distribution, and new possibilities of freedom.  We should ask ourselves what kind of body actually emerged from the "cultural liberation" introduced by modernisation and high technology. The answer could lie in Susan Bordo's notion of "the body of unbearable weight" - the term Bordo views as a symptom of "the gendered nature of mind/body dualism".[19] As a result of boundary thinking, the body of unbearable weight performs the procedure of purification as well as that of the regulation of the aforementioned fear which, as I already explained, springs from the distopian uproar that occurs whenever the female body and the artificial seem to fuse. The distopian counterpart of the utopian concept of ideal weightlessness could also be described as "fatness" which Maud Ellman defines as "the very hallmark of modernity (...) it has come to embody everything the prosperous must disavow: imperialism, exploitation, surplus value, maternity, mortality, abjection and unloveliness."[20]

We could thus say that, due to this ambivalent attitude regarding machines, "a dream of mastery versus the anxiety about the loss of control, becomes bound up with a psychic ambivalence, of desire mixed with dread, regarding women."[21] It is, however, not sufficient to interpret the analogy between the female and the demonic in machinery from this kind of perspective which, by the way, haunts many of an art historian of modernity (Huyssens, Burger, Foster). This is the perspective, where the uproar in terms of distopian phantasies pertaining to woman-machine is interpreted as a kind of critical corrective of masculinist dreams to conquer nature, and as a negative remainder of the possible failures of the self-sufficient reason. This kind of standpoint strongly differentiates between nature/mind or nature/culture, inevitably classifying the female body to the domain of nature which strikes back whenever the demarcation line between life and non-life has been transgressed. The main supposition concealed in this understanding is that technology, or the history of it and that of science, is not really the matter of woman; even if regulated by force, woman inevitably carries the burden of the body, a part of unpredictable nature.[22] The fusion of woman and artificiality, of woman and technology results in the birth of a ghost in the machine - and that ghost is actually the body.

The distopian representation of the female body is neither just a warning against the failure of utopian idea of progress, nor the sign of nature; it reveals something much more important for the understanding of the organic/technological relationship. Researching the history of technology, and reinterpreting the common belief that the latter is not really the matter of the woman, Sadie Plant revealed a connection between computer programming, cybernetics, and weaving.[23] The most important fact which is the result of her recongition is that weaving could be interpreted as a body technique, a forerunner of contemporary networking and digital matrixes. The demarcation line dividing body techniques and mind operations thus evaporates; the fact that "the computer was always a simulation of weaving"[24] reveals embodiment in the very heart of programming, and remains a disrupting factor at any attempt to throughly differentiate between life and non-life. The demonic in the female body mocks the basic illusion inherent in the modern understanding of technology - the belief that technological reality is essentially bodiless, non-physical, non-material in character. Or, as American theorist and historian of cybernetics Katherine N. Hayles states it, what is the origin of the belief in non-physicality, or in the non-material character of information? Or, more specifically, as asks Canguilheim, whence the modern illusion that machines actually originate in the rational? Can technology (as far as its relation to the body is concerned) really be interpreted solely in relation to the process of purification, so that the inevitable presence of hybridity can be expelled into the terrifying realm of distopia?

The ghost which is haunting the machine is that of the body itself;  through this perspective, one can also interpret Haraway's description of traditional machinery: "Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always a spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny called spirit of history, according to taste. But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid."[25] Contemporary technological reality, the late twentieth-century machines "made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed."[26] Inscribed both into the body and technology, hybridity constitutes a part of the original meaning of techne, which was forgotten with the modern instrumental usage of technology, and criticised partialy as early as in Heidegger's work. The development of high technology which no longer serves the sole purpose of functionality and prothesis, but essentially contributes to the establishment of new realities, enables us to finally stop searching for a hierarchically organized organic wholeness - and code the body anew. New ways of creating identities have been introduced; the body's ambivalence is embodied in the new trust in the inviduum and its power to design its own self. As says Katherine N. Hayles: "Teleology is replaced by emergence, objectivism by reflexive epistemology, autonomous will by distributed behaviour, the body as the supporting system of reason by embodiment, and the dynamic partnership between nature and intelligent machinery by the liberal humanist manifest of control over nature."[27] The human being thus becomes part of a distributed system, with the power lying precisely in his dependence. The construction of identities does not turn the body into something disturbing, into a disrupting remnant of nature, but enables it to be perceived as ambivalent, as something constructed, as a phenomenon revealed through representation in the relation between the organic and the technological. "It joins women on and as the interface between man and matter, identity and difference, one and zero, the actual and the virtual. An interface which is taking off on its own: no longer the void, the gap or the absence, the veils are already cybernetics."[28] The contemporary strategy would be to become the ghost in the machine - not a distopian reminder, but one aware of its continuous presence which has always mocked the traditional perception of technology and the self-sufficient status of the latter. When the machine becomes embodied, when we become aware of the continuous presence of the body playing its game in-between, there   also appears the possibility to verify the machine's social inscription, and to establish critical strategies we can employ in the future. The woman's body is no more a sole reminder, but the space of intrinsic strategies and praxes. We have namely been faced with the forgotten body, one continually disturbing the established system, identity and order, one that, according to Kristeva, "does not respect boundaries, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite."[29]

Bojana Kunst