The Cyborg is
Not a Post-Body Human:
Abjection and
the Posthuman Body
The human body is in a precarious
state at a time when new technology advances at an ecstatically dizzying and
nauseatingly terrifying speed. We
exist as simultaneously technophilic and technophobic, wanting the efficiency
and sleekness of machinery, but also fearing that it has the power to assimilate
us. Already technology has changed
the way we live and even the physical constitution of our bodies to the extent
that we bear little resemblance to our ancestors. In fact, these differences may be great enough
that we can no longer consider ourselves to be human, in the way that people
a thousand years ago were human. Technology
has changed the way we work, the way we play, what we consume, produce, and
ponder. We even begin to re-define
ourselves as biological machines, making more possible the fantasy of a true
artificial intelligence. Science fictions
actually have the potential to become scientific realities, and this is the
site of our horror. Even as we desire
to shed our corporeal bodies in favor of virtual ones, the science-fictional
images of a metallic world populated by homogeneous, monotonous robots makes
us fear for our “humanity”. It is my opinion that the cyborg, as a myth and metaphor, is a desirable
role model for the posthuman, and an agreeable compromise between technophile
and technophobe. This cyborg is not
to be confused with the android or robot - or any of the other metal “monsters”
of techno-fiction. The cyborg is simply
“a hybrid of machine and organism,” as Donna Haraway describes it; and as
I will present it, it is a metaphor for the posthuman embracing the abject.
I believe abjection to be an appropriate theoretical device for a culture
that is torn between fetish and phobia. It
is an analytical tool that can be used to renegotiate the boundaries laid
by the well-established psychoanalytic theory grounded in patriarchal hegemony. Most importantly, it deconstructs the desire
to eliminate the body and preserve the subject. The fantasy of a bodiless subject is replaced by the demand for
a posthuman body and dispersed subject - a situation with innumerable implications
for cultural/social/political/personal change.
Julia
Kristeva’s concept of abjection in her essay, Powers of Horror, is a challenge of the psychoanalytic theory developed
mainly by Freud and Lacan. Without
even knowing it, psychoanalytic theory informs our whole concept of the world
and ourselves, and it is such a deeply entrenched tradition that we don’t
even notice, let alone question, its constant reinforcement. It is the theory, accepted as fact, that we
are individual subjects who relate to objects and other subjects as “Other”
than the self, and that we are primarily motivated by desire. From this seemingly simple and innocuous assumption
arises an array of consequences. We
tend to think dualistically and make strict differentiations - between male/female,
self/other, subject/object, nature/culture, and true/false, to name a few.
This is the kind of thinking that supports a structure where a dominant
force takes power over an other, thus the creation and marginalization of
“othered” groups of people. Kristeva
reconceives the object-relation as an abject-relation. “The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which
I can name or imagine,” she says, “Nor is it an ob-jest, an otherness ceaselessly
fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone
or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and
autonomous. The abject has only one
quality of the object - that of being opposed to I” (PH 1). The object is in
opposition to the self, and that produces a desire for meaning. The abject, however, is “radically excluded”
and instead of producing desire, draws one “to a place where meaning collapses”
(PH 2). The abject is always something
that both pulls and repels. It fascinates
and disgusts. The abject is “something
rejected”, like food, a corpse, excrement. These are things that we cannot separate ourselves from, things
that “one does not protect oneself from as from an object”, so it “beckons”
and “ends up engulfing us” (PH 4). These
objects of exclusion, or abjects, are disturbing because they dissolve proper
bounderies between ourselves and others, between inside and outside, between
life and death. Even though these
things can be disgusting, it is “not a lack of cleanliness or health that
causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.
The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (PH 4).
It is not simply an “identification” with these ambiguous ab-jects
that causes the boundaries between “I” and not-“I” to slip.
Abjection is at its most potent when the subject is weary from trying
to identify with something outside of itself.
It is then that the subject “finds the impossible within; when it finds
that the impossible constitutes its very being,
that it is none other than the abject”
(PH 5). Here, Kristeva points out,
the ego splits. The person is both
subject and abject at once, but she also poses herself as an Other - a judging
Other who finds the abject loathsome even while the subject is drawn to it.
Kristeva describes a feeling of jouissance, where the abject is not known
or desired, but simply taken joy in. There
is a jouissance “in which the subject
is swallowed up but in which the Other, in return, keeps the subject from
foundering by making it repugnant” (PH 9). The “I” is not the homogeneous “I” of a simple
subject with a single identity. The
“I” is heterogeneous, involving the abject, the fascinated part of the self,
and the internal Other who comes from outside, as a predescessor and a possessor,
an Other who imposes signs, symbols and rules to inspire loathing (PH 10).
This fragmented vision of the self comes from a time before birth,
according to Kristeva. Abjection is a remembrance of the pre-objectal
stage. In the womb, one is not aware
of the self because there are no objects to compare oneself to, and there
is no language to differentiate anything.
“Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship,
in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another
body in order to be” (PH 10). In the
painful passion of the abject, the ego is splintered and finds joy in the
indescribable - the unknowable and the undesirable. When the subject is dispersed, there is room
for simultaneous diversity, for a multiplicity instead of an identity. In the absence of dualisms, there are no marginalizations
- all possibilities are equally viable. This kind of analysis lends itself to negotiations
of all manner of diversities, including race, class, and sexual preference
- not just sexual difference, as was the focus of psychoanalytic analysis
(Chanter, 1).
But where does the dispersed subject actually exist, except theoretically in the myth of the cyborg, whom I have proposed as an abject being? Where is the model for this potential model for posthumanity? Just as ancient art in Eurocentric cultures was reflective of the desire to realize a perfect, whole, ideal human Self, postmodern art is evocative of the deconstruction of the essential Self. Abject art replaces the object of desire and admiration with an “undesirable” object. These “bad objects” (Kauffman, 47) are meant to inappropriately fill a lack left by the “good objects” - or perhaps the original good object: the mother’s breast. Fetishism (which constitutes a substitution for something that has left a void) is a common aspect of abject art.
The
abject is, perhaps, most poignantly represented in performance art, where
human bodies are physicalized in the act of abjection. A prime example is Bob Flanagan - a performance artist who responded
to the pain of cystic fibrosis by becoming a masochist. By performing brutal acts of S/M, often with
the help of his partner and dominatrix Sheree Rose, Flanagan externalized
his pain and projected it onto the audience.
The body was treated as meat: he enacted “the stubborn corporeality
of the self while refusing any conception of this corporeality as fixed in
its materiality” (Jones, 226). He
made it evident that the body was not a site where the “meaning of the self”
is manifested. Kristeva says, “Abjection
is a resurrection that has gone through death (of the ego). It is an alchemy that transforms death drive
into a start of life, of new significance” (PH 15). This was certainly true of Flanagan, who not only lived a more invigorated
life in spite of his illness, but it seems he was actually able to live longer
because of his self-mutilation. Flanagan
challenged his audience’s conceptions of what a sick person should be by performing
explicit sexuality. He also reduced
the pain of his illness by mutilating his flesh and focusing on more unambiguous
physical pain - “which excruciatingly scrambles the boundaries between the
physical and the psychic” (Jones, 230). Flanagan is an excellent model for what a posthuman
body can be. Transferring his pain
to the audience while at the same time distancing himself from himself (and
then the audience from him because they have already identified with him through
shared suffering) is an effective metaphor for abjection resulting in dispersal
of the subject.
Of
course, there are those who would prefer to retain their absolute subject-hood
and eliminate the body instead. The
more we interact with silicon-based machines who seem to have a subjectivity
of their own through increasingly complex and “friendly” interface systems,
the more we envy their freedom from the demands of a carbon-based body. The fact that our bodies need to eat, sleep,
and excrete gets in the way of our virtual lives, where we imagine ourselves
pure, clean, and immortal via the machine.
In the information age, it is only our minds capable of absorbing that
information, mostly visual, that matters - so if we could only download our
consciousness into a stylish, streamlined silicone shell, we could exist free
of baggage, forever. The problem is
that elimination of the body does not break down any of the false dichotomies
inherent in the dualistic, psychoanalytic, capitalist mind. One imagines a utopia where there is no racism,
sexism, or any other possible discrimination of a person’s difference because
there actually are no bodies to be seen - the only difference would be an
intellectual one. But the patterns
of repression are still in place. Even
without bodies, we would find ways of discriminating among each other. We can already see hints of this by observing
chatroom behavior on the Internet. The
Internet has the potential to be a world where bodies don’t matter, and yet,
there is a strong desire for identification. The very first question you will often see asked in a chatroom is
the standard a/s/l? (age, sex, location).
This virtual world where anonymity is actually possible does not stop
people from categorizing each other. In fact, it promotes an atmosphere of
assumption, where one takes for granted that the subject they are interacting
with is white, middle-class, and physically “normal” in all of his or her
functioning. One does not encounter
the sick, the handicapped, or even the unattractive online. As Haraway says, we can see “deepened dualisms
of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social
practices, symbolic formulations and physical artifacts associated with ‘high
technology’ and scientific culture” (Bell, 295).
Obviously
it is this concept of an essential self versus Other that needs disassembling,
and not the physical body. The desire
for a bodiless self, to become the ghost in the machine, is a drive toward
purity, the opposite of the abject. It
reinforces the patriarchical status quo by essentializing the subject and
eliminating those who fall into the margins, asking them to virtually become
what is already considered to be normal and ideal.
So,
if this post-body human will only reinforce the same power structures that
are problematic now, how do we come to terms with a posthuman body at a time
when bodies feel like baggage? The
cyborg is a human body augmented by technology.
For the technophobe, the cyborg as defined by Haraway can be as non-threatening
as a simple tool-user. If one wants
to argue that the use of fire, the lever, and the wheel, are all “technologies”,
then humans have already been cyborgs for a long time, and the problem of
physically accommodating the electronic isn’t necessary - but this extreme
isn’t very useful for dismantling the subject. However, if the technophobe will grant that
advancements in medicine are acceptable technologies for incorporation, then
“cyborgs with heart monitors, organ implants, and artificial limbs already
walk the earth” (Morse, 126). Indeed,
aspirin and Prozac have changed the human threshold for physical and emotional
pain already, and the incorporation of synthetic chemicals into the body is
an everyday occurrance.
As
for the technophile, the cyborg can be as technologically altered as one dares
to imagine, provided that the organic and artificial elements are both present.
What is important is that the body exists as a site for incorporation
and abjection. In her “Cyborg Manifesto”, Donna Haraway argues
for “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries, and for responsibility in their
construction” (Bell, 292). She says
her cyborg myth “is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous
possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed
political work” (Bell, 295). The model
of the cyborg is not about “perfecting” the human race, or immortalizing it.
It is a metaphor for a kind of human, a posthuman, who can embrace abjection
and negotiate boundaries rather than rigidly construct them according to a
system of dualisms based on the psychoanalytic assumption of an essential
self reflected against the Other. Haraway
says,
From
one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of
control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars
apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of
women’s bodies in masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984). From another perspective, a cyborg world might
be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid
of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently
partial identities and contradictory standpoints (Bell, 295).
The use of abjection as an analytical tool and the
use of cyborg as a metaphorical role model for the posthuman present endless
possibilities for celebrated diversity within human experience. While the idea of losing the essential self
to an amorphous multiplicity might be frightening and the concept of bodily
incorporating technology into a cyborgian posthuman form disturbing, one must
consider how much more terrifying
the future is without these kinds of drastic changes.
Bibliography
Bell, David and Barbara M. Kennedy.
The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge.
New York. 2000. (Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto”. Free Association
Books. London. 1991.)
This is an incredible resource that
I would have used more of, if I was going more in-depth into the subject. Obviously, Haraway was the basis for my example
of cyborg as a role model for the posthuman, so having her essay was essential.
Chanter, Tina. “Viewing Abjection: Film and Social Justice”. www.women.it/ 4thfemconf/workshops/spectacles2/tinachanter.htm
I found this essay extremely useful
just in understanding the idea of abjection and applying it better. I didn’t site any quotes from this essay, but
it did help to organize my thinking.
Jones, Amelia. Body Art: Performing the Subject. University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis. 1998.
I used this as a resouce for my information
on Bob Flanagan. Again, I could and
would have used a lot more, if I had had the leisure of writing a longer paper.
Kauffman, Linda S. Bad Girls and Sick Boys. University of California Press. Berkeley.
1998.
This book is incredibly amazing, and
I would use it a lot more. It is very
lucid and accessible. It is an absolute
treasure of information and ideas.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press. New York.
1941.
My primary resource, and a pretty heavy
one. I hope I can go back to it and work it out even further.
Morse, Margaret. Virtualities. Indiana University Press. Indianapolis.
1998.
Very valuable information and ideas
in the chapter “What do Cyborgs Eat?”, but I didn’t get to use as much of
it as I might have liked. In writing
a longer paper, I would have at least talked about “Imagination Dead Imagine”.
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