Filozofski vestnik Letnik/Volume XXIII • Številka/Number 2 • 2002 • 191-204 T H E B O D Y BYTES BACK MARIE-LUISE ANGERER Discourses about endings are still very much present. After the spectre of the end of the subject, the end of the human being as such has been raised through genetic engineering and new political decisions concerning research and medical in tervent ions . The e n d of democracy and art has also been prophesised; not to mention the implosion of the public realm and the un- dermining of its apparent opposition - the private. Especially the end of the body has been intoned in various scenarios. A closer look, however, makes it evident that it's not so much the body which has come to an end, but the understanding of it, the perception of it, the images of the body which have changed over the years and: the more we talked about the end the more the body commenced to occupy the centerstage of our personal and public life. Partly, of course, it's true to say that the body has lost its importance if we, for instance, consider the decrease in manual work where the strength of the body and its apparatus had been a major presupposition. But at the same time, and if we look back over the last 30 years, there has been an incredible resurgence of interest in the body, in its shaping and modification - piercing, tattooing, dieting, fasting, sport, dance, losing or gaining bulk, fat or muscu- lature. Strategies by the fashion industry, nutrition, and socialisation rules have put the body in a remarkable, spectacular place - the body has become the most attractive spectacle in our society. But what do we mean when we talk about the BODY- is it the surface, the skin of the body, its appearance, or is it the body with a soul, an inner space? Is it the sign of gender which marks the body? Is it the moving body or the medical model of the body? Are we talking of the genetic model of the body as the carrier of all informational data? To hear, to smell, to grasp, to talk - the mouth, the eyes, the arms, the nose, the lips, the skin - do these parts of the body and all of them together form the BODY or do they have, quite to the contrary, a life of their own - redefining the body's materiality, its bor- ders, and its structure again and again? 221 MARIE-LUISE ANGERER Various tendencies have worked together to create a new perception and new images, representations, new strategies of visualising the body — influenc- ing discourses, academic disciplines, terrains, and locations. One has to look at art, theory, and societal developments together to see how these forces have constructed the body as a site of contestation - a contestation which circles around the question of the cnature of the subjectx The body as book With the arrival of the book - as one of the most decisive media - the body gained the status of a book: the skin was compared to the cover, the back of the book with the human back, the front-page with the human front, the body of the book with the human body. From then on this body book was understood as keeping its own secrets, following its own rules and laws, and telling its own stories in different languages. Particularly in the second half of the 18th century the body came under the control of two different sets of knowledge producing systems. On the one hand there was science, such as medicine and biology, and on the other, the new born humanities - peda- gogy, linguistics and economy. The First one (anatomical research) opened - literally - the body to reveal its secrets and to produce the model of ideal bodies. The humanities produced their own interests - economics, history, language building the mainframe to analyse man's being. In the course of the 19th' century seeing, speaking, and controlling became recognised as sci- entific strategies. According to Michel Foucault, it was the time of the docile body, a body shaped and formed by different discourses and institutions such as the family, school, police, the hospital, etc. For Foucault, it was absolutely clear that it was particularly the invention of psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud - the famous talking cure, by which the body and its phantasmatic dimension - sexuality & desire - had lost their former innocence. This means that body and sexuality - which before Freud were understood as the , had changed sides - and thus commenced to occupy the terrain of culture. Of course, this is not quite right - the body has never occupied the side of nature, but for the first time with Freud one might say that human sexuality was clearly separated from animal procreation. 222 T H E BODY BYTES BACK From nature to culture - from body to ego and back again In The Ego and Id (1982 [1923]), Freud defined the ego as a boundary surface. From the description of the conscious as interface, Freud proceeds to the shell and the core, the ego, is regarded as a psychical cover, as a point of contact or relay point between the outside world and the psyche. The skin is the "real body." As Freud describes it, the body, and especially its surface, is a site of both external and internal perceptions at the same time. It is seen as a separate object, yet the sense of touch provides it with two types of sensation, one of which seems to be a sense of internal perception, seemingly inside the body (Cf. Freud 1982 [1923]). For Freud, it is not the projection that makes the ego, as , superficial, but rather it is the body itself that func- tions as superficies.1 According to Jacques Lacan, however, the ego does not recognise its own superficial character and thus insists on a (fictional) sub- stantiality (Cf. Weber, 1978). While Foucault defined sexuality as the name of a historical dispositive that is based upon no reality, I would rather suggest - insisting on a psycho- analytic basis - to see it as an a-historical moment, thus to understand sexual- ity as the , as something quasi-universal opposed to various forms of genders and sexual practices. It is well known that Freud paid particular at- tention in his work to the drive, which he sharply differentiated from instinct. This drive might be understood as a transition, as a link between sexual and gender identities, as, so to speak, the place where the original cleavage2 in- scribes itself, and which does "business" under the name of sexual difference. From the very beginning, Freud had always defined the drive as a threshold concept, as something that marks the border between the somatic and the psychic - but which is not the border itself! The drive as used by Freud em- bodies a mental representation. And Lacan assigns to this mental representa- tion a separate name - the famous . This small object desig- nates precisely that moment at which sexuality begins to function as a retro- spective in and through the symbolic order. Lacan provides a long list includ- ing the voice, the gaze, the phoneme, as nothing else but possibilities of the 1 Freud later added an explanatory note: "The ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensation, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be re- garded as a mental projection of the surface of the body, besides, as we have seen above, representing the superficies of the mental apparatus." (Freud 1982, p. 294, footnote 2) 2 "Differance" as the original deferral which forms the essence of life: "It is far more so: since deferment (differance) is not an essence, because it is nothing, it is not life, if being is defined as ousia, presence, beingness/reality, substance or subject. Life must be consid- ered a trace, before being is defined as presence." (Derrida 1976 [1967], p. 311) 223 MARIE-LUISE ANGERER objet petit a. This means that the drive attains satisfaction in and through this object; desire, however, is endless. And both constitute that which unfolds as human sexuality in its diverse manifestations. The body - a contested zone Throughout the same period - over the last three decades - the body has not only attracted more and more attention, but it has also been separated from its gender. The famous formula "sex & gender" has been regarded as having made tremendous progress, as having become a bulwark against a biologistic point of view with regard to gender identity. But a remnant of uneasiness has remained, since "sex & gender" (sex = the body, and gender = the social-cultural roles of gender) cannot really be separated. In the early 90s, this uneasiness was formulated by Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Moira Gatens and many others. The body can only manifest itself, this is the tenor of these authors, as one marked by gender, which means that there is no body outside of the symbolic order. Rather, this order produces different bodies, female and male bodies. In response to criticisms of Gender Trouble (1990), where Butler had intro- duced the body as radical construction, she restated in Bodies That Matter (1993) her unders tanding of the concep t of a discursive performativi ty as a "materialisation of sex." "Performativity is always a reiteration of a set of norms," (Butler 1993, p. 12) which produces its references, its materiality as bound- aries, fixations and surfaces. These may change through the course of his- tory, and they are shaped by so-called "regulatory schemas"3 into respectively intelligible bodies. In this way, Butler has attempted not only to dynamically comprehend the materiality of the body, but also to reunite sex and gender as inseparable categories. This means that the body must always already be sexually marked, in other words, always already in the position of gender, in order to be read as culturally intelligible. Right on the heels of Butler's work came Elizabeth Grosz' critique of gender. Unlike Butler, gender represents for Grosz a redundant category, since it is only defined as a "performance of sex" (Grosz 1995, p. 212). Grosz defines the body - following Deleuze and Guattari - as a "sexed body" sub- 3 Butler characterises regulatory schemas as those historical, mental, social formations which direct, define and change the imaginary morphology of the body. (Cf. Butler 1993, 13f.) 224 T H E BODY BYTES BACK jected to a constant "becoming-other"4 which materialises itself in this pro- cess of "becoming." As Grosz emphasises, body and sexuality prove to be pro- foundly unstable categories. This instability goes deeper than the variability of gender identities, for the body must ultimately be grasped as something which could do much more than culture permits it to do. Here we have a body with extremely liquid boundaries and osmotic contours, a body with a remarkable power to incorporate and expel inside and outside in a continu- ous process, "to open itself up to prosthetic synthesis, to transform or rewrite its environment, to continually augment its power and capacities through the incorporation and into the body's own spaces and modalities" (Grosz 1994, pp. 187-88). Both bodies become in the repetition of doing. A becoming which is essentially accompanied/born by its sexual ascription, while it is also always and already crossed/disturbed by it. However, as Elizabeth Grosz claims, drawing upon Derrida, it is precisely that original void, linked to the metaphorics of sexual difference as trace, which smoothes the way. According to Derrida's view, sexual difference is a sexuality preceded by an exclusive assignation - male and female; it is a kind of "raw material," from which the sexes emerge - depending on the specific historical-psychical situation. Against this background Grosz defines sexual difference as "the horizon that cannot appear in its own terms but is implied in the very possibility of an entity, an identity, a subject, an other and their relations" (Grosz 1994, p. 209). Now this is exactly what I mean with the name sexual, as the prerequisite for male and female. Sexual difference is thus that first cleavage, which in- deed does not emerge as such but, as original negativity, determines the posi- tivity of genders. In The Ticklish Subject Slavoj Žižek has turned Butler's Gender trouble on its head and made body trouble out of it, since sexual difference - according to Žižek, "indicates the enigmatic domain which lies in between, no longer biology and not yet the space of socio-symbolic construction." And he continues by arguing that the point one has to emphasise here is "how this in-between is the very cut which sustains the gap between the Real and the contingent multitude of the modes of symbolisation" (Žižek, 1999, p. 275). Thus sexual difference is a failure o f / i n the symbolic order. 4 Deleuze/Guattari define becoming-other as "an encounter between bodies, which releases something from each and, in the process, makes real a virtuality, a series of en- abling and transforming possibilities." (Grosz 1994, 134) 225 MARIE-LUISE ANGERER The time of informatics - the body bytes back "I want," as Donna Haraway once wrote, "a feminist writing of the body that metaphorically emphasises vision again, because we need to reclaim that sense to find our way through all the knowledge and ways of seeing. But not just any partial perspective will do; we must be hostile to easy relativism and holism built out of summing and subsuming parts. Passionate detachment (Anette Kuhn) requires more than acknowledged and self-critical partiality. We are also bound to seek perspective from those points of view, which can never be known in advance, which promise something quite extraordinary, that is, knowledge potent for constructing worlds less organised by axes of domina- tion. In such a viewpoint, the unmarked category would really disappear - quite a difference from simply repeating a disappearing act. The imaginary and the rational - the visionary and objective vision - hover close together" (Haraway 1990, p. 192). So Donna Haraway in the mid 80s - affecting not only feminist discourse on "body & gender," but the discussion of knowledge, science, technology, truth, objectivity, politics in general, many years before Butler and others, commenced to deconstruct body, sex and gender. Haraway asked: where does the body end, what counts as part of the body, what makes a body human or non-human? All of these are questions defining the borders of the body, and renders the body back, as a question of definition. And this question has quite obviously come - not only in the field of information and reproduction tech- nologies - under new pressure. Where do we draw the line? Not so much as an answer to this question, but more as a mean of imagining a situation still unthinkable, invisible and yet not makeable, Haraway introduced the figure of the cyborg. This cyborg illustrates a new hybrid form of being, half elec- tronic, half biological, but also historically constituted. According to Haraway the cyborg arises at historical moments of social transition; times of radical uncertainty when borders are broken or under threat, and traditional strate- gies of drawing boundaries no longer function: moments such as the present when the distinction between man and cybernetic organisms are breaking down. (Cf. Haraway, 1990) In this context Haraway draws particular atten- tion to the porosity of bodily boundaries, in particular the skin. As we have already heard according to Freud, the skin is a key element in the construc- tion of the Ego as such. It follows that the bodily interface is from a psycho- analytic perspective, the question of the subject itself. This means further, that Haraway's question, "why should our bodies end at the skin?" (Haraway 1990, p. 178), should not be understood only in this sense of a new merging of machines and human bodies, but also from an 226 T H E BODY BYTES BACK epistemological perspective, which means that these (body) boundaries are virtual in the sense of their powerful implementation and their possible actualisation. This can be seen as her reference both to Michel Foucault's concept of power — the docile body, which I have mentioned earlier, and to Deleuze & Guattari's desiring machines, the body without organs, etc. Like Deleuze 8c Guattari, Haraway conceives the subject and object not as oppos- ing entities, but rather as affinities, as things that affect and are affected, that assume and reject. In this sense, her cyborg may be read as something unfin- ished, as something that must constantly redefine its boundaries and whose identity is a nomadic one. What Haraway wanted with her figure of the cyborg is to present a radical attempt at re-thinking the relationship nature/cul ture/ technology and along with it the relationship human - non-human, although, here there are, of course, many questions she leaves unanswered. Even more, many attempts of artists and filmmakers to use the concept of the cyborg - to create new visions of the human being, often lead to traditional, familiar, stereotypical and old images of male and female bodies. In her Manifesto for Cyborg (1990 [1984]) Haraway turned Michel Foucault's Birth of the clinic (Naissance de la clinique 1972) on its head and she wrote: It's time to describe rather its death, since the hospital, the school and other institutions analysed by Foucault wouldn't be the normative forces interpel- lating the individuals as subjects (in the sense of Louis Althusser) any longer. She agrees with Foucault that psychoanalysis might be seen as a culmination Tina LaPorta, Cyberfemme (1993) The Loss of Depth MARIE-LUISE ANGERER in the process of normalisation. At the same time Deleuze/Guattar i re- proached Freud's psychoanalysis for the same reason - as being the cure for something which has been introduced or stimulated by its own introduction. Thus Haraway tried in her own approach to ignore or overcome Freud and everything connected and influenced with/by the unconscious. Her cyborg has only surface, skin is no longer the border between an inner and an outer space, but rather the interface between the other and me, or the interface between the machine and the human. In this sense Haraway might be seen as a protagonist for feminist thinkers and others to focus on surfaces, connec- tions, interactions, hybrid species, etc. Haraway saw herself much more re- lated to Deleuze and Guattari and their or . But her refusal of an unconscious (inner, deep) space as the kernel of the subject (as something from the outside which seems to occupy the very inner place) has not only been a relief (in the sense of an antihumanist stance) but it has also produced new problematic formations of identities and iden- tity politics. Haraway's definition of a new feminist policy, embracing race, class and gender differences, is grounded implicitly on a subject who inten- tionally acts and negotiates, who knows about him - and herself and the oth- ers. There is no space left which goes beyond this kind of agency. Now, one could argue that we are facing the same problem with Deleuze's & Guattari's (actually Spinoza's). Deleuze/Guattari don ' t accept any transcendence or unconscious in a Freudian sense either. But the two philosophers "instantiated-know" something which goes beyond the individual, i.e., there is a space and a time beyond the individual's time and space. It is at the same time crossed by two opposite movements: towards the rock (the rock of the ego) and away from it. The famous clines of flight> and the terri- torial and reterritorial forces subjectifying the individual to a state, a nation, a family, a name, a sex, class and race, mother or father, etc. Whereas "subjectification" means that "one is always a subject in, or a subject to, either the State or Capitalism, and its aim is to produce more surplus value," subjectivation describes "lines of flight within the subject." But these lines of flight have less or nothing to do with the individual. They rather point to- wards an "individuation operating by intensities, within individual fields not within persons or identities" (Deleuze, cited in Murphy 1996, p. 98). 228 T H E BODY BYTES BACK The Body - Nothing too Much Detlef Linke, a German neurologist and author of many books on the bra in a n d the h u m a n being, s tated recently5 that the ant ihumanis t deconstruction, starting with Heidegger, did not really push the project of mankind towards any relief. The farewell of the subject has not been followed by any ethical (as in the case of Kant) thoughts or imperatives. If there isn't a master there won't be any order, so far Linke. Thus the figure of the angel is a remarkable one, since angels have no body, they are pure words, their or- Klonaris/Thomadaki ©, from the Angel Cycle Klonaris/Thomadaki ©, from the Angel Cycle 5 Paper presented at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, On V. Flusser, lecture, Janu- ary 15th, 2002. 229 MARIE-LUISE ANGERER dering is one of words, a symbolic order which is not disturbed by any decay of the flesh. There are many examples in which angels play a powerful role - especially with regard to cyberspace and virtual reality. Angel-like subjects are flying across the data space and their bodies are like shadows eternally light. Why the angel? Why here? The Greek artists, Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki," have been working for many years on their Angel Cycle (1985- 2001, Le Cycle de I'Ange), paralleled by other projects such as Sublime Disasters (Desastres sublimes) in which the figure of the twin plays the central role. Again a figure which is neither human nor machine, neither male nor female, nei- ther flesh nor image, similar to the one of the angel. This is exactly the mo- ment where I would like to reintroduce the body - neither-nor, but too much! In my last paragraph I will confront three different bodies: the cyborg, the angel and the anorexic. Each of them underlines in a specific way the double constitution of the human being: a being of need and of desire. In a remarkable note about anorexia nervosa Jacques Lacan stated: "It is the child one feeds with most love who refuses food and plays with his refusal as with a desire (anorexia nervosa)" (Lacan cited in Shepherdson 1998, p. 30). And he continued: "It's a failure of the gift of love." The example of the anorexic - in a society of fullness - if we focus at least on the industrialised countries - points powerfully to the nothing and too much of the human being and its specific materiality - the body. It is the difference and the doubled constitution of the human being. "As far as the oral drive is concerned, (...), it is obvious that it is not a question of food, nor of the memory of food, nor the echo of food, nor the mother 's care, but of something that is called the breast. (...) To this breast in its function as object, objet a cause of desire. (...) we must give a function that will explain its place in the satisfaction of the drive" (Lacan cited in Shepherdson 1998, p. 47). Thus in eating the Nothing the drive finds its satisfaction and the anorectic her peace with the uncontrol- lable body. The cyborg doesn't have a drive nor a desire, h i s /her body is under the control of various power stations, but s / h e has no future, no vision, no desire. The angel by contrast can' t find a place - neither here nor there. Whereas the anorexic body is sentenced to death, the cyborg's fate is just to be. The angel by contrast is meandering from one side to the other and back again - introducing the order of desire combined with a body which can't be framed. I am very aware of the potential misunderstanding one might pro- duce in installing the figure of the angel as the ideal or best visualisation of the double status of the human being. The trope of the angel is much too overburdened with a huge variety of cultural interpretations! But neverthe- 6 The two artists have been based in Paris for more than 25 years. 230 T H E BODY BYTES BACK less the transparent body of the angel indicates powerfully the relationship of the drive and desire in a convincing visual way. Nothing— too much: an endless movement of becoming- between full and empty - symbol and sign — signified and signifier- between without-organs and organisation. All these dichotomies are telling examples of a bodily dimension which itself is not part of the body. There is always already another degree of mate- riality or a different layer involved. Something which Lacan tried to articulate with his distinction of need - demand - desire. To conclude: The ongoing debate about whether we are already living in a post-human epoch or if we are only on the way to becoming cyborgs (as Haraway put it) is missing a decisive moment. The question is not so much whether the body can be genetically improved, its organs exchanged and sub- stituted with animal and artificial organs. The question is rather: whose body? There is never a body, there is always a body and a subject, even though one can't separate the two dimensions in a strict sense. But the dimension of de- sire is that of the subject and therefore of the unconscious - which like an envelope - covers the material base of the body. Even if one changes the genetic code - as the real - a symbolic and an imaginary order have to be evoked to grasp this occurrence as a human event. References Butler, Judith (1990) Gender trouble - Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, London. Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies That Matter. On the discursive limits of sex, London, New York. Derrida, Jacques (1976 [1967]) "Freud und der Schauplatz der Schrift," in: Die Schrift und die Differenz, Frankfurt/M., pp. 302-350. Freud, Sigmund (1982 [1923]) Das Ich und Das Es. In: Psychologie des Unbewußten. Studienausgabe, Bd. III. Frankfurt/M., pp. 273-330. Grosz, Elizabeth (1994) "Experimental Desire. Rethinking Queer Subjectiv- ity," in: Joan Copjec (ed.), Supposing the Subject, London, New York, pp. 133-157. Grosz, Elizabeth (1995) "Ontology and Equivocation: Derrida's Politics of Sexual Difference," in: Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion, New York, Sydney, pp. 59-82. Haraway, Donna J. (1990 [1984]) "A Manifesto for Cyborgs. Science, Tech- nology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," in: LindaJ. Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, New York, London, pp. 190-233. 231 MARIE-LUISE ANGERER Murphy, Andrew (1996) "Computers are not Theatre: The Machine in the Ghost in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Thought," in: Convergence, vol. 2, number 2, pp. 80-111. Shepherdson, Charles (1998) "The Gift of Love and the Debt of Desire," in: differences, vol. 10, pp. 30-74. Weber, Sam (1978) Rückkehr zu Freud. Jacques Lacans Entstellung der Psychoanalyse, Frankfurt/M., Berlin, Wien. Žižek, Slavoj (1999) The Ticklish Subject, London, New York. 232