10/16: Bodies That Splatter
October 9, 2007
- Doyle: Wetwares!
- Doyle: LSDNA
- Doyle: Transgenic Involution
- Special Guest: Rich Doyle
Entry Filed under: Uncategorized. .
20 Comments Add your own
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <pre> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed
1.
Sharon | October 16, 2007 at 9:18 pm
My attempt to acquire enough background information to make Doyle’s argument in Wetwares discernable took me on a revelatory journey through cyberspace. I simply wanted to find out the meaning and uses of some key terms such as wetware, rhetorical software, post-vital body and along the way I made some interesting discoveries.
Although human cryonics is currently not reversible, a reversal from a cryonic death might be possible within ten years–for pets. Because of the successful experimental revival efforts on animals, pets can now celebrate re-birthdays. In the mid 1980s Alcor, a cryonics organization in Scottsdale, Arizona, replaced a German Shepherd’s blood with a synthetic material, cooled the dog to 4 C, and successfully restored the dog to life after the heart had stopped and there were no brain waves. In ten years time, one website reports, we will be able to revive pets that have died or clone pets from a sample of their DNA. There are some web sites that report that we will be able to do the same for humans in the next 40 years. The cost of cryogenic preservation is not exorbitant. Life insurance policies cover the cost of cryogenic procedures which fall under the category of health care. It costs $120,000 to store a body and $50,000 to store a head.
BadGraffix sells a T-shirt with the slogan “Free Ted’s Head.” The head they are referring to is the head of the baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams who is rumored to have been cryonically preserved at Alcor. Although Alcor has committed itself to protecting the confidentiality of its clients, there are a variety of stories in circulation on the internet about the way that Ted William’s body has been handled. One account claims that William’s body has been preserved all in one piece in a cryotank with four other bodies. The author of another site claims that Ted’s head has been severed from the body. Another reports that there is a lack of standard of care in the preservation of the bodies, the heads of patients having been dropped several times or unceremoniously stored in buckets of liquid nitrogen.
Doyle uses the term “rhetorical software” to account for the way in which the coupling of information theory with molecular biology has not only allowed researchers to make new discoveries about the body, but has also produced new ways of thinking about life and death. In this instance, it appears that information theory is the catalyst or “rhetorical software” that first enabled Watson and Crick to see the way in which amino acids, bases, proteins and enzymes function together in the production of a living body. Seeing the molecular functioning of the body as an information or encoding system rather than as pure material substrate enabled Watson and Crick to claim that they had discovered the “secret of life” with the discovery of DNA. “There is a relational account of matter and language” writes Doyle “and it is the notion of the relations between such framing and the actualization of scientific practices that I seek to mark out with rhetorical software” (1977).
Through the reconceptualization of the body that the coupling of information theory and molecular biology allow the body and life are deterritorialized. The body is no longer an organism that contains an essence.
Life is a complex configuration of information patterns that can be used to revive the body even after death caused by organ failure. The reterriorialization of the body opens up new possibilities for being that seem invigorating at least on a purely biological level. But what thought has been put into understanding the psychological effects of living out an anachronistic existence? Why do we cling so tightly to the idea of the perpetuation of our own existence? Are we that invested in the thought of simply being or do we desire to live because of the relationships we develop with others in the process of being? Would it be satisfying to live out a future existence in which the world we know has vanished? How practical is the thought of living in a world without death?
2.
Jack McIntyre | October 17, 2007 at 1:05 pm
When Doyle mentions an anonymous, comatose pregnant woman in Wetwares he does so to explore the implications of rendering a virtual subject to determine what the “real” absent subject “would have wanted”. The case demonstrates a familial discourse, subjectivity “bound not to consciousness but to the production of other live bodies”. But, in passing, he references another discourse, one of sexuality, when he describes her impregnation as a “horrifying rape”. Obviously the word rape raises issues of consent, and as Doyle points out regarding her pregnancy, this issue of consent is very complicated and difficult. Perhaps the woman “would have wanted” to have sex with this anonymous man, in the same way that according to her mother she “would have wanted” to bear the child; according to the familial discourse the family should have decided. Yet Doyle does not attribute the characterization “horrifying rape” to the family; it seems to be his own language. By what discourse does he have the right to conclude she would not have consented?
While one might use this as evidence of gender bias regarding sexuality (when, in The World According to Garp, Garp’s mother impregnated herself by mating with a brain-dead man, was that also a “horrifying rape”?), my purpose is not to malign Doyle. In fact, his slip (assuming it was a slip) is telling and useful, in that it seems to show that he (we?) are perhaps not quite ready to accept the implications of his work on our conception of the subject. This issue of whether or not a woman can be forced to bear a child is hotly debated, whether the mother is comatose or not. His example is, in this respect, “safe”. A much more interesting conversation: can the family of a comatose woman give sexual consent for her? Doyle’s claim that “the family functions as a relay – or ventriloquism – of desire” (169) suddenly has a whole new psychoanalytic meaning. Perhaps they would allow her husband to have sex with her, but when the husband annoys the family they might decide she would have wanted to divorce him. Later the family might meet someone she would have fallen in love with, and she could remarry. They could even “sell” her, like in Kill Bill, or would that violate prostitution laws? This is starting to remind me of a section of Neuromancer that Doyle does not mention: the character Molly, to fund various enhancements to her body (for example, retractable claws under her fingernails), worked in a “puppet parlor” as a prostitute. While working she is not mentally present. She is “renting” her body, but not herself as subject. She gets the body back knowing nothing about what happened to it.
Consider general anesthesia: presumably the subject is absent from the body during this time, so we allow surgeons to slice us up. This is obviously very similar to what Molly did in the puppet parlor, except in Molly’s case her body was (probably) used for sex instead of surgery. Considering the common belief that sexuality is one of the most private and essential characteristics of the subject, it is no surprise that it is generally socially acceptable to kill a comatose body (at least indirectly), and cut it up for organs, but the idea of someone having sex with it is “horrifying”. Despite writing a very thoughtful book about, at least partly, how current conceptions of the subject are becoming obsolete in the face of new technologies, he is still attached to old conceptions of the subject when it comes to sexuality. He is certainly not the only one.
Considering what we’ve read so far in this course, especially Foucault, Doyle, and Nietzsche, I am more convinced than ever that humanity needs a sort of Copernican revolution in its conception of the subject, and I hope this essay illustrates that such a revolution must include, perhaps even be based on, a new comprehension of sexuality. Doyle touches on this, with his discussion of Darwinian sexual selection. My questions: does sexuality actually play such a huge role in constituting the subject? Why? Can it/should it/must it be changed, as Doyle seems to imply? Are current rhetorics of sexuality akin to a peacocks feathers, detrimental to survival, counterproductive, yet self-perpetuating? How can it be changed, and what should it be changed to?
PS I admit this is a pretty out-there response; maybe I shoudn’t have tried to write a paper about 2 words; live and learn. But I think there is something to the point that “we” are perhaps most attached to conventional subjectivity when it comes to sex.
Also, here’sthe question I wanted to ask Doyle, in case anybody has any thoughts on it:
Wetwares explores how cryonicists have prepared for the possibility that their consciousness will not be continuous between death and reawakening, and have prepared journals, etc. to “remind themselves who they are” (or something). If consciousness is not continuous, what do they hope will be continuous? Is it the body? If so, why wouldn’t organ donation serve their purposes? Is it the physical brain, separate from the mind? Is this an issue discussed in the cryonics community?
3.
Crystal Starkey | October 17, 2007 at 1:36 pm
A Doyle Title:
“Thousands Die Each Year Waiting for Someone Else to Die So They Won’t”
Doyle’s “Wetwares” discusses the emergence of the postvital body: the postvital body is the body in which the vital body has escaped. According to Foucault, life can reveal itself only insofar as it remains a mystery. Thus the vital body is our vitality—our zest for life, while the post vital body is the body immersed in that which is beyond the body, which, if fully conceptualized, contributes to understanding life. In essence, the post vital body understands the meaning of life because it transcends existence—the norm of vitality. The post vital body is not caught up in the immediate gratification, the seemingly sexy and rhythmic for purely affect reasons. Rather, the post vital body exceeds the vital body because, although it allows for a loss of self control— interconnectedness with the “permeability of the body,”— the postvital body’s character is a multiplicity entangled with other multiplicities.
According to Doyle, we are addicted to ‘becoming’ and seduced by the future, regardless of its relevance, actual possibility or overall depth of meaning to us. In order to achieve the vital body Doyle says humans must become entangled with what has not yet happened until the individual self dissolves into its objects of perception. Doyle seems to align himself with a Nietzschean thought here: Doyle claims the trick here is NOT in thinking but rather relying heavily on intuition rather than thought; Nietzsche would agree. Nietzsche recommends we find a balance between the Apollonian and Dionysus influences in a nation, which, under such a severe capitalistic rule, leans aptly to the Apollonian affect. Doyle, in his recommendation to evaluate and make sense of our addiction to becoming and seduction by the future, agrees with Nietzsche and thus recommends leaning towards Dionysus’ influence of feeling rather than emotionless, logical thought.
Doyle further recommends we intuitively enter and extend beyond the human condition in order to truly grasp the human condition the way we must: without knowledge of the future or real definitions of life’s meaning. This idea is furthered in his chapter Take My Bone Marrow, Please: The Community in which We Have Organs in Common; here he discusses a new ‘company’ he’d like to start (), one where people “get paid now for a future interest in [their] possibly healthy organs” (174). The problem, according to Doyle, is that to achieve this deterritorialized technoscience knowledge production as capital itself, bodies must also be deterritorialized. Doyle says there is a personal transformation which occurs during our pursuit of becoming because the infusion of the future depends on our future state. And, our current actions, reactions, thoughts and emotions determine our future state. So, if we are in step with Doyle, it becomes clear logical coherence of his argument depends on a knowledge we do not yet possess. In order to “get” this deterritorialized knowledge we must allow ourselves to be seduced by the future and addicted to becoming, without knowing what the future holds or what becoming entails. Our decisions, then, are guided by an anticipation of future knowledge.
Postvital note: Doyle also discusses the frozen body awaiting its cure and the artificial internet ‘second life’ as that which dissolves the boundary between life and death, between human and machine. Does this second life, where we have more command of the false merely self-replicate the first life? How does this effect the online public sphere—our temporary autonomous zones— in that we present a slice of us, our essential subjectivity?
4.
mike | October 17, 2007 at 1:37 pm
RhetWares
An inherently bizarre response that started with an attempt to rewrite Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”
As an invention strategy, I sometimes take note of single words being used in unexpected places. Here is Doyle:
The word that fascinates me in this passage is agonistic. Doyle appears to be using it in its most familiar sense of the encounter, the connection, that leads to a scene of rhetorical productivity; as Doyle’s book both demonstrates and embodies, these post vital sciences are rhetorically productive: both within the spheres of discourse immediately surrounding them and within such works of theory as Doyle’s. I intentionally overlook here Doyle’s second sense of production, that of sexual re/production, not due to lack of interest, but because I can already tell this response will be another long one.
Three strands of thought present themselves in response to this passage:
1. If we import Hawhee’s elaboration of the agōn as contest, challenge, or competition, Doyle’s text opens up in some intriguing ways. First, of course, this agōn reminds us of Darwin’s theory of life as a constant struggle for survival; perhaps with this in mind we can read Doyle as suggesting something here about the nature of vital connectivity: the agonistic interface of nature and culture is one in which neither reigns unchallenged—instinct remains forever embedded in our genetic code, despite the best efforts of society to dismiss and deny it; conversely, learned behavior, while easily mistaken for second nature, is never wholly at peace with primary nature. But this just trades on familiar tropes of nature vs. nurture, civilization vs. the wild. It is important, then, to remember that the agōn is above all a productive encounter, one in which (as Nietzsche’s “Homer’s Contest” suggests) the goal is less to defeat your opponent than to mutually strive for the productive site of rhetoric. In this sense, then, perhaps we can read Doyle as suggesting that it is in the very encounter between nature and culture that something emerges, that a scene of rhetoric occurs and produces . . . what? “The Human?” “Life?” One thing Doyle has done has challenged the assumed meanings of both of these words, implicitly critiquing our chauvinistic definition of life as that which best complements humanity’s sense of itself as possessing dominion over the inhuman, and, by de-centering the definition of life, questioning those facets of humanity which are most commonly used to define our supposedly unique nature: self, interior, the subject.
2. What, then, is the nature of this encounter? It is difficult to answer, despite or because of the multitude of forms its answer has taken. We can survey a handful of them from our readings so far. To present vastly reductive readings of each. For Plato, the encounter is between reason and rhetoric, truth and falsity: here the agōn is a contest between the ideal and the debased, the eternal and mortal. What is produced here, perhaps, is meaning itself—the assertion that there is meaning of some sort, whether transcendent or otherwise, and that there are ways to discover, use, and manipulate it. For Hawhee’s sophists, as we’ve seen, the encounter is between two ambitious students, learning how to wrestle and argue, to be aware of one’s opponent and to strive with him toward each one’s best. The result: a well-trained athlete-rhetor, whose capacities are expanded through the agonistic encounter. In Nietzsche, the encounter is pitched in the realm of the eternal: the spirits of Apollo and Dionysis meet and produce a bewildering vertigo of subject and collective. As Nietzsche describes it, we seek in the Dionysian spirit a respite from the demands of individuated subjectivity, but the Dionysian collective is finally broken by the reassertion of Apolloian individuation—what is produced, then, is the subject himself. For Burke, the encounter is between the human animal and the world; language, motive, and subjectivity are the product of this meeting. Most recently, in Foucualt, the body encounters power, and power dictates to the body the appropriate form of its own use. Thus, what is produced in the agōn of disciplinary power is, again, the subject, this time bound by the codes of power and rendered, twofold, as a subject of power and the object of knowledge. What each of these has in common, then, is that the agōn remains in each a site of productivity, with the common product of all being the subject—albeit, of course, a radically different kind of subject in each. If the agōn is a fundamentally rhetorical encounter—that is, one in which the outcome in every case can be said to the production of some form of rhetoric—then “the subject,” at least within the terms suggested by the aforementioned, is an inherently rhetorical construct: it is a meaning, a persuasion that one exists in a certain way with certain attributes. We each say to ourselves: I am convinced that I am.
3. Finally, a return to Doyle. Doyle doesn’t argue for a new form of subjectivity, in part, I think, because his goal is more simply to point to the ways in which postvital technologies and the associated theoretical discourses have troubled our assumptions about subjectivity: in short, and to what may be Doyle’s most significant comment on the subject of the subject, subjectivity is in flux, multiple, and unresolved. I think what Doyle says of alife might also be ascribed to life itself or to subjectivity itself (the two terms are not equitable, Doyle teaches us, but I’m not sure which is most applicable to the following): “The promise of alife”—or of life itself, perhaps, or subjectivity—“is that something is always about to happen” (30). If life or subjectivity is essentially rhetorical, it is so in at least two ways: first, as the product of a rhetorical encounter, as we’ve seen, but second, in its irresolvable state of constant anticipation, life is continuously and continually reinscribed as a kairotic experience. Life is of rhetoric and moves toward rhetoric, constantly awaiting the “always about to happen” encounter that promises the production and reproduction of itself.
Coming up: a response to Jack. Also, the (aborted) verse version of my response can be found on the blog.
5.
Crystal Starkey | October 17, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Hi Jack.
When I read that section in Doyle, (about reminding ourselves of who we are), I took it a bit different.
I journal; it is a record of my experiences– thoughts, feelings, daily events, etc. I have mounds of them, hiddenly stashed and stored in various places of my house, my father’s house. When I return to them, some of the thoughts and emotions recorded there feel like another person’s experiences in that I do not recall feeling that way or thinking this way. But there is a familiar tone, a familiar style, a familliar voice and process I recognize as being mine. Often, there IS that “Aha!” moment when something fairly important from my past had receeded to the depth of my mind’s abyss, only to be resurrected upon re-reading my journal entry (all of this has a point, I swear).
I would agree with you that if the consciousness is not continued, what’s the point in cryonics? What are we clinging to? But at that point in the text, I took Doyle’s idea to be similar to my journal: A reminder, a record, so we can pull out the details buried within us and remember…. us.
6.
mike | October 17, 2007 at 2:47 pm
In response to Jack: Well, thoughts inspired by Jack’s response more than a response to Jack himself. Jack’s response has a hell of a lot going on, so please forgive my own lengthy and likely-to-be disorganized response.
I’ll start with what I read as the most intriguing point Jack makes:
Here, both through the Neuromancer and anesthesia examples, Jack touches on an interesting phenomenon vis-a-vis rape. Much is made of rape being a “violatory” act, and the question I’d like to raise might at first seem one which has an obvious answer: In cases of rape, who or what is being violated?
But consider: if we accept Jack’s comparisons above (and I’m waffling on whether I do), then rape is fundamentally a crime against the body, but, in particular, the body-as-property. That is, this figuration of rape essentially depends upon treating the body as a commodity whose owner(s) are established as possessing rights over it, rights that presumably include the consent for use of the body for sexual purposes. This would, in effect, also explain the furor re: child pornography and child sexual abuse: since children are not legally allowed to enter into binding contracts, they have no legal right to consent to such uses of their bodies and therefore any such use–even if “consensual”–is legally impersible. And, as Doyle demonstrates, the body-as-property is precisely what seems to be at issue in the Jane Doe case: does Jane Doe’s family has legal rights over her body-as-property sufficient to dictate its uses (including both the real instance of childbirth or Jack’s hypothetical “sex-for-sale” examples)?
Another turn of the screw (maybe poor word choice in this context). If we do not accept Jack’s examples as above, then rape is situated as essentially a crime against the subject. This, in turn, can be understood in two ways. First, it is a violation of the subject’s legal rights to control his or her own property and, as such, seems more a civil breach than a criminal one. Obviously, this idea of the violated subject is more or less dependent on accepting the corollary argument above about body-as-property.
In a second way, though–perhaps a more familiar way–the subject is violated in an unspeakably intimate fashion, as the forced sex act violates not just the “legal subject” but also the “ideal subject,” for lack of a better phrase, that part of an individual that “makes us human.” The violation comes, then, in precisely rape’s act of disturbing the subject-object divide: the raped subject becomes–for the brutal duration of the act–someone else’s object. Rape is precisely the point at which one’s own subjectivity is violently breached and disregarded.
Obviously, taking rape to mean either of these forms (body-rape or subject-rape) exclusively leads to further problems. If we maintain body-rape as the “real” violation behind rape, we seem to disregard entirely the validity of the emotionally devastating and traumatizing effects of rape, which I am sure most of us and most people generally would be loathe to do. In this sense, rape is equitable (or at least comparable) to joy-riding in someone’s car. (The very analogy is disgusting.) Similar problems arise with the violation of the “legal subject.” If we abide by the formula of the “ideal subject,” though, rape’s criminality (in an admittedly extreme case) is vastly diminished: it becomes little more than an obscene gesture, a scene of personal disrespect. Figuring the “ideal subject” as the key term in an understanding of rape reduces it to little more than hurt feelings.
I think that’s what makes rape so interesting . . . er . . . from a theoretical point of view, of course. Rape cannot be undertsood over only one of these registers without radically diminishing the act in some way that seems an offense without precedent. Thus, rape would appear to be one discourse at least where, contra Hawhee, the body and the subject are still very much entwined.
Or something.
7.
mike | October 17, 2007 at 2:47 pm
And a link from LOLTheorists that hearkens back to the panopticon: click here.
8.
eric herhuth | October 17, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Shroom Shake(speare)
The talk of deterritorialization has reminded me of my favorite Shakespearian moment and more than just bodily, it is excessively bloodily. In the play Cymbeline, at the end of IV.2, there is a fascinating scene where the heroine Imogen takes the blood of the headless corpse belonging to the villain Cloten and smears it on her face. Because Cloten is in disguise when slain, Imogen looks at the clothing on the body and believes it to be her beloved husband, Posthumous. In her grief Imogen declares, “Give color to my pale cheek with thy blood, / That we the horrider may seem to those / Which chance to find us” (330-2). The corpse’s blood has become the face-painting of grief and a mask aligning her appearance with the terror (her affect) of the corpse she lies next to. Upon rereading this scene, I cannot help but notice some intriguing parallels with Doyle’s “LSDNA.”
The initial reason for this proposition is that Imogen finds the headless body upon awaking from a drug-induced sleep. To be brief, Imogen is duped into taking a potion that feigns a bodily state of death and it is immediately after this that she is thrown into her experience of grief which prompts her bizarre actions. Doyle’s argument for the contribution of experiments/experiences with LSD to understanding DNA and the development of PCR may find a proto-argument in Shakespeare’s Imogen.
In the soliloquy Imogen delivers during the scene, the language describes her trouble discerning reality from dream. She hopes that the reality she sees is a dream but believes earlier events in the play to be “nothing / Which the brain makes of fumes” (297-301). Her intoxicated slumber has caused her to question her recollections as well as her sense of the present. She explains, “The dream’s here still. Even when I wake it is / Without me, as within me; not imagined, felt” (306-307).
This can be compared to Albert Hofman’s autobiographical account of his self-experimentation with LSD in which he describes the alarming effect and how part of the alarm was due to the ability to compare the recollection of sober reality with hallucinogenic reality. Doyle concludes from the account, “LSD-25 is not easily erased from the experience and memory of the experimental subject, a subject who, like it or not, is recording” (LSDNA 163). A similar process of recording can be observed in the character of Imogen after her drug use.
Granted, there are many obvious differences between the dramatic scenario and the autobiographical experience described by Hofman, nonetheless what seems remarkable in this rough comparison is how the dreamlike drug experience in both cases influences the subject in the post-drug state. The recollection of the experience participates in identity and thinking. This is the suggestion Doyle argues through Kary Mullis whose use of LSD was one of the influences that led to the invention of Polymerase Chain Reaction or PCR.
On the other hand, Shakespearian critics have never agreed on textual conclusiveness explaining Imogen’s mistaking the headless body of Cloten for that of Posthumous. But it is interesting to note that in her soliloquy, Imogen imagines the cause of her woes to be a conspiracy involving Cloten and the trusted Pisanio who gave her the drug: “The drug he gave me, which he said was precious / And cordial to me, have I not found it / Murd’rous to th’ senses? That confirms it home. / This is Pisanio’s deed, and Cloten” (326-9). I now read these lines as explaining Imogen’s misrecognition, she’s under the influence, and if that’s the case then her conspiracy theory is probably driven by symptomatic paranoia and her blood make-up is the result of hallucinogenic deterritorialization and reterritorialization. That is what hallucinogens seem to do, isn’t it? Thus, Doyle’s argument has illuminated this scene as an example of “consciousness expansion.” To ground such an argument historically would require research into drugs available to Shakespeare, and maybe Imogen was on to something with her bloody blush. If Doyle can market marrow why not blood as skincare?
**Without knowing, I have unconsciously commented on the question put forth by Jack, which Crystal has also commented on. The consciousness forgets as well as remembers. It records stuff that it is not aware of and it deletes stuff that it was very much aware of. This is one of the things that the instances of drug use in the foregoing entry elucidate, and it reminds me of why writing, like journaling, is useful; unless Plato’s suspicions are right that it is the writing that has prompted our consciousness to forget and the written word only distorts true recollection with its ambivalent significations (Phaedrus); it seems that writing and LSD have more in common than I first thought. Nonetheless, I would like to suggest that the forgetting is equal to the remembering in terms of identity construction. The subject operates on memory and non-memory; thus, the journal of the cryonicist may omit as well as record specific events for the sake of self-alteration. For Deleuze and Guattari, within “the uncertain nervous system” there are significant differences between short-term and long-term memory: “Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the instant but instead with the nervous, temporal, and collective rhizome. Long-term memory (family, race, society, or civilization) traces and translates, but what it translates continues to act in it, from a distance, off beat, in an ‘untimely’ way, not instantaneously” (A Thousand Plateaus 16). While I equate memory and forgetting, it seems that Deleuze and Guattari may formulate otherwise in their championing of short-term memory—this is the memory that breaks away, takes new directions, and arguably may inform the kairotic timing of rhetorical legend. Where would this categorization of short-term and long-term memory position itself in Doyle’s vision of postvital living? Perhaps the answer is out there, floating amidst the collective memories of seminar 7007 participants.
9.
Clay Walker | October 17, 2007 at 4:27 pm
What About the Stem-Cells? – A Question for Richard Doyle
No longer attached to orgnaisms, life becomes an emergent attribute of information systems, networks without any obvious center (145).
Doyle argues that with the increasingly complex development of medical technologies that extend the life of the human through mechanical means (life support) or biological means (organ transplant), the digital event of life/death becomes extended to accommodate a continuum of death (147). I would like to foreground my question today in two examples from “Wetwares!”: the coma and organ transplantation.
In the case of the coma patient, mechanical life support exports biological functions like eating, breathing, blood-pumping, blood-cleansing, defecating into fully mechanical apparatuses that inhabit all modern hospitals. The event of waking-up from the coma is a mechanical substitution, an event of rebirth for the subject that at once complicates and threatens the vitality of human reproduction; this is what Doyle calls the ‘virtual maternal’. For the patient receiving an organ transplant, there is perhaps a bit of chance in that another patient dies and donates (willingly or not) the needed organ. Of course the transportation and implantation of that organ depend on a variety of technologies, but crucial for Doyle’s account is the installation of another’s organ within the body of the self – the flesh of the other. This biological life support, however, depends on certain fungi that help the body ‘keep’ its new flesh. In a long passage, Doyle describes the impact of the transplant, with emphasis on corporeality, futurity, function, becoming and differentiation: the production or extension of life vis a vis organ transplantation demands an opening of our concepts of corporeality and autonomy, the futurity of the organ recipient depends on organs cleaved from one body to another, they are other within the self, invaders that the self relies on for a future; as Doyle writes, “organs must become concepts – treatable and articulable in terms of their ability to become rather than maintain” (166).
My question is, so what about stem cells? If the survival of the coma patient is a mechanical extension of the body and that of the organ transplant is a biological extension of the body’s capacity, then I see stem cell research as a bio-mechanical extension in which data (DNA) is extracted from one source (body of the self) and mapped onto a bundle of cells that are indeterminate, or at least may be indeterminate. That is, they are neither self nor other – at least, they are not other in the sense that a group of these cells have no more subjectivity or identity or consciousness than a few flakes of skin. It would seem that a bundle of cells infused with DNA and directed to grow or develop according to a particular lab or medical agenda could not be either self or other, but something else, something in between, a little bit of each. Maybe its a chicken and egg question – which came first cellular organization or DNA? Anyway, I would be interested to hear your perspective on stem cells in regards to your larger project; also, as a sort of professional question, why did you decide not to include this topic in “Wetwares!”?
10.
Jared | October 18, 2007 at 3:23 am
7007 Response #6
~Jared
Wow. Again– this is some really nice work done in response. I particularly enjoyed Jack’s self-proclaimed “out-there” reading in class (which was only suitably creative… and not nearly “out-there” in comparison to Doyle)… though Mike, you would certainly out do us all in this agon… had you completed the sequel to Kubla Khan (which would have required a class-wide opium binge).
I am hoping to get more into this text through the responses this week… I seemed to have a case of generic disease this week (oddly). Everything I touch turns to simple summary and exposition. This is what came Tuesday morning out in response to the readings.
This summer I read some Gregory Bateson. His musings introduced me to systems theory and cybernetics. He organized assorted systems like biology, anthropology, psychology, economy, and similar “living” systems (an alcoholic for instance) into interactive functional flows of energy, material and information that we create rather arbitrarily, but which become ordinary to our perception and ordinary functions in the world. General system theory gave him a method to study almost anything under constant change and self-preservation — it allowed him to study and scientifically question broad segments and thin slices of reality. This approach may also have freed his personal stylistic approaches to incorporate interesting analyses in various forms — for instance Steps to An Ecology of Mind starts with ‘metalogues’ such as “What is an Instinct” and “How Much Do You Know” as energizing diagnostic exercises.
Doyle took this rather creative but formulaic scientific approach in systems theory to the uncategorized/unclassifiable by blowing up systems and “reality” in its own positive feedback loop. Doyle theorizes and arranges information theory and cybergenics through spiritutal-theoretical-psychedelic self-discoveries, much of it is wound up in panic and dispersed through the mess of “Alife” and bio-technological eddies. Doyle notes that it is perhaps a simpler practice to grow ‘Alife’ than to describe it (33.3); and hence it seems only possible to describe it in retrospect, as he does in his discussions of growing “white widow” or creating “Alba.” Trying to understand Alife through P.K. Dick, Burroughs, the effects of cannabis porn on the viewer, Timothy Leary, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a hermeneutics of DNA, and hallucinogenic self-experimentation, ultimately, Doyle indeed forgets coalitions and “provokes swarms” that we can reflect on.
For me, this is something genuinely interesting about Doyle. He suggests that these futuristic but present informatic events are “less a phenomenon to be understood than a potent mutagen of human experience, mutagens that could be understood only retroactively” (LSDNA). So we are given representations of Alife that entangle and provoke swarms in Doyle himself. Doyle’s book, along with his websites, online lectures, and other writings are living systems that disperse through space and time, unfolding systems of growing explanations of life itself distributed, and allying representations of life that may become the very software for a new alive network. Doyle shows us how huge philosophical questions are stealthed into information bits that are driven in networks energized by a wet sensory system, nervous system, and muscle tissues. Messages are dispatched and returned more complex more ecological, dislocated and selected through his postvital rhetorical representations–ribotypes.
Doyle, like Leary, plays with the second rule of thermodynamics, where energy tends to diffuse through entropy into broader energies, spaces, and bits. There are many versions of this rule, and many explorations into it, but as I started with Bateson, and his thinking about taking steps towards an ecological mind, I was initially going to ask what you all thought about Doyle’s proposed and exemplified Mind/body/nature relationship. Do you see Doyle’s individual mind re-represented as something immanent in a network that is ecological/technological/spiritual…as a sign of possible future… or is he already living this? If so, where is Doyle’s agency in this entirely incorporated system? Does he create a self-adjusting system of thinking/acting/determining?
Mike… I was wondering what you thought might be going on in the agon of Doyle’s mind? Maybe he has a Burr hole we can peek into.
11.
Jennifer Niester | October 18, 2007 at 2:27 pm
In order to understand how the idea of life as information effects those of us who do not intend to become frozen heads, I turned to the e-zine of all things techy, Wired News.
What I found was the emerging field of android science and finding self-help through information control. They are different, and more comfortable, approaches to the what it means to see our lives as networks of information. There is no LSD involved, no sense of being out of control, no uncertainty as we hit the “run” button and hope for the best results. There is this idea, though, of transcendence, what Doyle describes as “the desire to be ‘above everywhere,’ a position from which one can articulate, finally, the formal characteristics of a life in this moment of its dislocation” (35.6).
However, in the two examples I found of information being utilized to run life systems, the android science of creating robotic dopplegangers and the new self-help approach of programming your life to free your mind, there is a threshold that is not crossed. Both the scientist, Hiroshi Ishiguro, and the self-help guru, David Allen, seem to retain the idea of a sacred interiority and use information science not to set off a chain reaction but to regain control of their own personal time. There is not a transaction happening between the human user and its computerized tools, rather there is an expelling of the external junk to allow the users to transcend the information that is tying them down. Gary Wolf in his critique of Allen’s book, Getting Things Done, writes, “Allen says his goal is to be free from worrying about anything he has to do. His techniques allow him the pleasure of having, much of the time, nothing on his mind.” In the article, “Meet the Remote-Control Self,” Ishiguro is quoted as saying, “If I could have one at the university, and one at ATR, I would just do all my work from a hot-springs resort.” Ishiguro doesn’t seem to fear that his doppleganger will turn against him or render his salaried-cyberpresence unnecessary.
While the robot seems like the most striking connection to Doyle’s Wetwares, being described as by Ishiguro as “a kind of simulator for expressing human functions, especially the cerebellum or the muscles [and] a kind of ultimate human interface,” I am more interested in Allen’s self-help guide. Unlike previous bestsellers in the genre, Allen does not ground his advice in philosophical reflection. Referred to as a “life-hacking movement,” it is grounded in how information runs our lives and about reprogramming our lives to create a network of effective action.
The GTD method is described like a type of software, being called by Allen as an “installed thought process.” The process is installed by organizing daily tasks in a diagram containing over 20 nodes and directional arrows. Wolf describes Allen’s method almost as one would describe a computer game, “When it comes to processing incoming signals, Allen recommends sorting by the most immediate criteria: How long will it take, what is your location, what devices do you have at hand, what other people are present?” This program is designed to help people manage themselves and gain control over their destiny, which seems at odds with the computer programs it seems to be simulating. Doyle quotes a CryoNet message stating, “If we knew what the result of a computer program would be, there would be little point in writing or running it” (86.7). Instead of seeing programming as executable code with unpredictable results, Doyle uses his program to transcend the decentralized mish-mash of incoming signals to reign sovereign from above.
Still, there are striking similarities between Allen’s approach and Doyle’s Wetware, such as focusing in on the promise of the future and of what life-could-be. Doyle expects his approach to eventually become the norm (the norm being when this “system” becomes an invisible network of information driving actions and lifestyles) and a necessity to face the demands of tomorrow. It is designed to help us get beyond what life is and prepare for the possibility of what life could be.
Q?:
What Allen seems to be arguing in his book is that information functions like the walls of an institution, trapping us in and defining who were are and what we can accomplish, and that we must move from a nodal position to some sort of central hierarchical state overseeing the “flow.” Is there some sort of counter move of control that can negate the oppressive/disabling effects of societies of control? Or is there just another type of control emerging as we try to self-discipline ourselves for our future capacities in the ideal of what life could be?
12.
Michael Cipielewski | October 18, 2007 at 3:28 pm
After reading Wetwares, it is my firm belief that I can confidently throw sanity out the window (Doyle, I mean this in the most endearing way) so I may express myself as freely as possible whilst still communicating the “meat and potatoes” of this thing I call a “response”. If interzone’s conception was under the influence, likewise my conception and grappling with Doyle and Burroughs, it seems, would be best served without interference from my gray matter, my bio-logic-bomb.
To bastardize Nealon from last week: Being William Burroughs ties yourself into the system. It also doubles Burroughs, distributes his identity throughout the mediascape – in this case, the Nike mediascape imperative, “just do it” and the like. Burroughs becomes Nike, becomes Burroughs, becomes the viewer, the television, et al. Jean Rhode, an Ad writer, actually penned the mantra shown by Burroughs in the Nike campaign “the purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain, but the serve the body.” (See “Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs” By Timothy S. Murphy 228-31) I find it hard to believe that Burroughs did not accept wholly the words he spoke for Nike, but also got a kick out of Rhode’s appropriation of a perspective Burroughs himself helped foster: in essence, the transhuman. Rhode’s appropriation of Burroughs’ discourse may be the key to understanding the transhuman in the context of advertisment as a phenomenon as well as the apparent division between artifact and organism.
So this may be the dynamic duo (double?) I was looking for last week: Burroughs and Doyle, the Batman and Robin to my bio-automaton heart (without the sex innuendos between them, though it is the first time ever I have read the words “money shot” in critical theory a la Doyle).
“It’s the coming of new technology…” This sentence fragment hangs on the air like a stench. Would it have been too much for Rhodes to finish it? I suspect Burroughs and Doyle, had they the agency to “screw the ad agency” and finish that sentence, it would go something like “It’s the be-coming of new technology… that affords the possibility for interfacing, the nexus of the humachine, the becoming of becoming before anyone knows where we’re going, or how, automation, propagation, and anticipation aside.” That was probably more how I’d finish the sentence (and I’ll assume no familial assertions over the dead or living!), but the concept, thus explained, (I would hope) would be well received:
I think Nealon may have lumped Burroughs in with an all too reductive category of appropriated resistance with advertisement schemas. Nike speaks to us through Burroughs – Likewise, Burroughs speaks to us through Nike. Burroughs, in short, interfaces Nike and the technology of media circa 1994. These nodes culminate into an effect of a “soft machine” – I speculate that Burroughs is a viral entity in the body of Nike, with his own agenda: immortality.
On immortality, Burroughs states, “the future of an artifact lies in the direction of increased flexibility, capacity for change, and ultimately mutation.” What is most interesting is that he describes the Flexibility, Change, and Mutation of an artifact, not an organism. The Nike/Burroughs artifact exhibits all three of the criteria for “immortality” as such.
I would make the argument that the coming of new technology, undoubtedly the unforeseeable future of technology, has allowed the “static” artifact of the Nike ad to come into a new context of biotechnology interface: Youtube. The future unknown, Burroughs is embedded in a Nealon-esque “molecular resistance”, that is, thirty seconds of resistance self-consciously parading around as advertisement, then (mutated) ripped to Youtube, watched over 20,000 times — and in discussing this very advertisement with a friend, apparently it has been embedded into people’s brains as a memory — in an even greater act of meta or mega resistance. In this way, (as Doyle describes the comatose) the dead, “speak”. In turn, each of these patterns of speech, these instances of speech, are tied up in time, place, and context.
As one commenter suggests, “This is the fucking interzone.” And I couldn’t be more pleased: this could be interzone, if anything, because the comment exists as an artifact to an artifact, to a context, to a biointerface, to a person, to persons, to a room, to a recording. Who knows what happens after all those nodes are connected in a million different ways? “The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain, but the serve the body.” Indeed, technology serves the body by becoming… by interface and context in the past, present, future.
I’m not entirely convinced identity is inherent in a body either, Doyle. In fact, I think the Burroughs ad shows that, strangely enough, ads, though they cannot be unmade, they can be remade; they interact with the forthcoming, these futures, these newest technologies, old technologies, recursive thoughts embedded in people’s brains that come out over a decade later on the phone (or in conversation with a seminar!). They show capacity for change in their iconic natures, that in the future contexts they may be used for… stuff. Any stuff: revolution, resistance, adverts, or any other context we do not yet have the vocabulary to describe. Doyle describes “one level of actualization for alife depends on their ability to be ‘befallen’ by human wetware, an actual response to the virtual,” and strangely enough… in this context, these advertisement artifacts show signs of alife! Am I not befallen?
Long live the new flesh!
My question is this: What room is there for isomorphic discourse in the context of mediascapes (or even this instantation of media: Burroughs via Nike) and examples such as those given by Doyle (Simlife, and so on)? Plainly: how are instances in media un/like those in, say, virtual contexts, as per “Digital pets” or instances of computer intelligences?
13.
Michael Cipielewski | October 18, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Clay:
Interesting point on Stem-cells. I would really like to know Doyle’s take on it.
The question seems to begin with the stem-cell itself. The different methods of stem-cell collection have manifested a code ethics, indeed a social imperative concerning what I feel are two broad categories: embryonic and consensual, the prior involving both embryonic stem-cells and other methods of collecting cells under the umbrella of reproduction (umbilical extraction of stem-cells, and so on), and the latter involving, well, all other methods, methods of extraction from adolescent or adult humans.
Mike’s points above in the body-as-property and consent are at play here as well.
I think socially embryonic stem-cells are a difficult topic to broach because they are set apart as “treatable and articulable in terms of their ability to become”. You and Doyle both were speaking of organs, but Doyle’s perspective on life production vis a vis organ transplantation is also life production vis a vis reproduction. The fertilization of an egg in any context complicates questions of identity and consciousness. There is a laminate effect cast over these collections of DNA, where their capacity for consciousness, identity, et al is synonymous with having consciousness. Whatever the reason for this projection of the consciousness of the future into the present, this category seems to hold a special place in the self/other dynamic: stem-cells are the other other. The embryonic stem-cells are allopoietic, sure, but the self they are fashioning is a “ghost-self”, a self yet to be. Maybe this is where the ambiguity beings? Doyle is right… “life is not ‘stuff’, but an ‘effect’” (28). Like familial decisions over “what the [patient] would have wanted”, identity and consciousness in coma and in embryonic stem-cells are projected, experienced by others when the body doesn’t exist (yet) or is incapacitated.
14.
Jack McIntyre | October 18, 2007 at 5:33 pm
A couple of people have responded to my response and I wanted to respond.
RE Crystal’s comment: I would take what you say about journaling to mean that even non-frozen, fully-living subjects are non-continuous. The you that reads the journal is not the same you that wrote it. Certain elements are the same, of course, but others are not, which brings us right back to Burke’s Permanence and Change. Doyle mentioned this too, at the end of the book, when he wrote about Derrida and worm-holes. Clay made a comment along these lines in class, and Eric’s response, about memory, plays into this as well. Obviously this idea about the non-continuity of the subject is not original, but while we are aware of the concept I don’t think we’ve really integrated it into our practical, functional conception of the subject. It reminds me of the Copernican revolution, which still hasn’t taken place, in the sense that while I know, intellectually, that the Earth orbits the sun, I still talk about sunrise and sunset. I don’t know if it’s possible or desirable to change my conception of the subject in such a fundamental way – maybe (probably?) the current model is in place because it works so well – but it’s interesting to me that I can read about/listen to/theorize the wildest ideas but my fundamental notions of myself as subject remain largely unaffected.
RE Mike’s comment: Very thought provoking. I agree it seems excessively reductive to characterize rape as purely a crime against the body or as purely a crime against the subject; even added together the sum is still far smaller than the actual trauma (physical and psychological) caused by rape. This discussion seems to imply the presence of a sort of dark matter in the subject/body entity.
15.
Kim Lacey | October 18, 2007 at 7:14 pm
I, too, will chime in on the stem-cell discussion, but I want to make the connection between cryogenics and cloning. I think this is an interesting connection for a couple of reasons, particularly the notion that there are expectations built into both of these. While reading Doyle, I was fascinated by the idea of the “memory box”—the collections of ‘things’ people offered up in order to ‘remind’ themselves of who they were after being brought back to life. It’s almost as though one thinks that he/she will be able to ‘start-up’ as though no time past, one can simply ‘pick-up and go’ without acknowledging the time gap (and now for some questions popping into my head over which I’m now going to lose sleep: what happens to duration?! What about actual/virtual time?! C’mon Deleuze and Bergson, help a girl out! If only one of you had been cryogenically frozen, I wonder what you would say about time passage?). Okay, back to business. These memory boxes are similar to cloning in the sense that cloned animals often exist to replicate the past, or to sustain a strong familial gene (and here “sustaining” is the connection to organ donation, as many have been talking about). With both cloning and cryogenics, one wants something to continue, and not to be altered (at least that’s how I see it). The memory box reminds someone of who he/she was, thus who he/she supposedly “is.” A cloned animal functions in the same way—it is the reminder (remainder?) of the original. I’m interested to hear Doyle speak on this—thanks for the prompt, Clay.
16.
Andrea J. Vought | October 18, 2007 at 11:15 pm
“The car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event.”
Richard Doyle’s chapter in Wetwares entitled “Uploading Anticipation, Becoming Silicon” ends with an interesting albeit sparse discussion of the “new flesh” and dissolution of the body in David Cronenberg’s film, Videodrome. The blending of man and machine is clear in this film, but Cronenberg’s other work also ventures into the immanence of technology and the deterritorialization of self in a slightly different vein. Steven Shaviro covers a lot of ground in this regard in his chapter on Cronenberg in The Cinematic Body, but there is simply not enough room to discuss them all. With that in mind, I turn to his 1996 film, Crash, in order to further investigate Doyle’s claims in “Uploading…”.
The film follows James Ballard (played by James Spader), who gets involved in a near-fatal car accident. While in the hospital, he meets fellow crash victim Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) and Dr. Vaughan (Elias Koteas), a deranged doctor with a strange fetish: restaging notorious celebrity car crashes for sexual pleasure. When the audience first meets Vaughan, he is recreating James Dean’s fatal crash on a local infrequently-traveled road. He is eerily like a televangelist, praising the euphoric effects of climbing into a car without a seatbelt, allowing himself to become the victim.
Doyle writes: “As multiplicities, humans garner their identities through transformation and adaptation rather than mastery and autonomy” (Wetwares 128). Cronenberg’s characters certainly do not—and cannot—master their own identities. When crashes are staged, the characters take on the identities of the real crash victims. What is especially interesting, though, is the totality of these transformations: the goal, for Vaughan and his followers, is death in keeping with the original accident, the ultimate transcendence. It is only through adaptation and simulating another that any sort of fulfillment is garnered. Vaughan and his cohort, Seagrave (Peter MacNeill) plan for some time to re-enact Jayne Mansfield’s death: one of the men will dress in drag and a wig, drive the same make and model car. Seagrave performs the crash, but without Vaughan’s knowledge. He thus becomes a martyr, fully succeeding in the simulacrum. These crashes are their moments of becoming, to use Burroughs-ean speak. All of the failed attempts facilitate becoming part of this collective crash identity.
Later on in the film, after Ballard is fully entrenched in the seedy eroticism of Vaughan’s world, the pair get tattooed. The tattoos themselves are jagged and primitive. Ballard’s tattoo is still fresh and bloody when Vaughan licks the skin where it was inked, thus melding together Ballard’s blood, Vaughan’s saliva, the tattoo’s ink. The two men are no longer discernable from each other, nor are they discernable from the materiality of the tattoo.
Doyle also writes: “Burroughs gestures toward a distributed identity, one that resides as much in others as in one’s ‘own’ body. Less an extinction of the self than its deterritorialization, Burroughs’ self is a becoming” (128). This deterritorialization is indeed a key part of Crash, too. All the main characters are utterly devoid of basic human emotion: Ballard and his wife are in a loveless marriage, each of them engaging in several affairs, all of which the other knows about and hardly seems to care. The most passion and ardor the audience sees from Cronenberg’s characters is while watching or participating in a crash. Vaughan is a savior to his followers. Even his own death is emulated by Ballard and his wife at the end of the film.
“Maybe the next one, darling,” Ballard tells his wife after their attempt to reenact the crash that kills Vaughan. They are unsuccessful, as one might suspect. Here, too, the audience gets another glimpse of Cronenberg’s characters’ goal of becoming: becoming part of the collective crash identity. Their own marriage, lives, identities, are meaningless without fully BECOMING.
“As connectivity increases, the interface between a weapon and its assemblage becomes indiscernible—not eroded, imploded, or occluded, but in a state of such entanglement that any attempt to draw a distinction between weapon and network itself becomes a complex algorithm, an algorithm whose shortest description is probably itself” (5). “Entanglement” is key word here, for obvious reasons. The very car wrecks themselves are twisted jumbles of flesh and metal, oil and blood. In these wrecks, the cars themselves are obviously damaged, changed, both by the people driving them and the forces around them. But the people inside the cars are changed, too. They are physically scarred (and perhaps tattooed), but the crashes effect affect as well.
Crash is indeed disturbing to watch, but less because of its overt violence and eroticism (the film does carry an NC-17 rating, after all) than its underlying message: man is machine, machine is man; the relationship between the two is inherently contingent, symbiotic, violent, erotic.
POST SCRIPT:
I came across this nifty little article today while perusing news articles online:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=3740984&page=1
In light of our readings and discussion this week, this seems especially pertinent. The author of the article seems quite sure of himself in saying that if people stop using BlackBerries and similar devices, the “phantom buzz” will stop. But I am skeptical. Given what we’ve read by Doyle, I have my doubts that, once changed, the body can return to its previous “normal” state. Thoughts? An interesting read, if nothing else.
17.
Katrina Newsom | October 19, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Sorry for the late response, I could not get online yesterday evening.
After reading Richard Doyle’s work on cryonics, I begin to think of the film “Vanilla Sky.” Although, according to Doyle, Robert Ettinger, the founder of the Cryonic Institute in Michigan, rejects the role that fiction plays in informing the public’s view of cryonics, I found that this film helped me to conceptualize Doyle’s concept of the ‘anticipated future’. In some ways, I understand Ettinger’s skepticism of such films in that they create an utopia view of the future and unlike Doyle’s description cryonics that functioned within the frame of anticipation for what the future can be, this film works within the frame of a nostalgia for a past that could have been. David Aames (played by Tom Cruise) is a young wealthy man who meets the woman of his dream one night and by the next day; he is disfigured and mangled by a former lover who attempts to kill them both. After his face is disfigured, his life spirals down to a point in which he commits suicide, but only after having purchased a space within a cryonics facility in which he is kept frozen for 150 years. However, the audience along with David experiences an upload of a dream in which he maintains a loving relationship with the woman of his dreams and receives restoration of his body by plastic surgery. Unfortunately, this fantasy world is fractured by traces of memories that reveal the reality of his past. In Wetwares, the concept of uploading relates to the replication of the self. As I was reading this concept, I struggled to understand the idea of a soul or essence of a human being coded into algorithms. I understand that the cryonic subject has some form of documentation that will inform their future self, but I could not help but wonder to what extent in which the restored individual regains the self outside actual experiences. The film tried to deal with this dilemma by uploading into David, the cryonic subject, memories of actual people and dreams of desired situations. And yet, the memory traces of his real past intruded into the dreamscape, which caused him to become consciously aware of his current state of being. He was asked to choose if he wanted to live in a future of “what can be” or remain in the dream of “what could have been.” He chooses the future only after spending several lifetimes in the past.
What I can’t help but think about when reading or viewing the concept of cryonics is that the possibility of preserving one’s body for the future can only be contemplated by the wealthy. The ownership of one’s body that can be preserved for a future life is a luxury that most people can’t afford. I find this very interesting when juxtaposing it the Doyle’s attempts to challenge the autonomy of the body. After lifting my head from texts that describe the lack of autonomy of one’s own body to the extent in which the basic human needs to eat, drink, or even use the bathroom are dictated and manipulated by the master’s whip, I find my understanding of the lack of autonomy of the cryonic body (the body being suspended and extended in time) challenged. I understand that in other areas of Doyle’s text (for example, organ sharing and transgenic), the role of hybridity in relation to the self disrupts autonomy, but the cryonic subject’s lack of autonomy – I have to ponder further. Perhaps, I am complicating this in ways that I should not. Maybe the slave body’s lack of autonomy relates more to agency whereas the lack of autonomy in the cryonic subject deals more with biology. Here I am left to ponder the question – to what degree does ownership of one’s body and autonomy deviate from each other? How are they compatible?
18.
Katrina Newsom | October 19, 2007 at 1:18 pm
In response to Crystal:
One way to think about the replication of the self in wake of the possibility of the cryonic subject being “reborn” into the future would have to relate back to the information they choose to store. In Wetwares, Richard Doyle writes about the information that the cryonic individual stores either in form of a tape/ CD or the publication of some of their works and other forms of memorabilia. The falsity that can reside within the storage of the memory of the self in the future derives from the fact that we do not have a complete understanding of the self. Our memory traces are convoluted with all manners of physical experiences and virtual memories (the memories of things we did not physically experience but still creates a visceral response). Therefore, the only representation of the self would come from a superficial ‘Apollonian’ take on what we view in the mirror; the image we construct of ourselves. For the question would have to be: Can the storage of publication inform the replication of the self in relation to the development of the individual’s relationships with friends, colleagues, family, lovers etc? Another thing we must consider is ethics. The storage of the self can be comprised of things that are not the true possession of the cryonic individual. In other words, the individual can use any information to constructed an entirely new identity of his/herself that could create a “replication of a desired self.” Honestly, in light of the current pop culture in which we live in where actors and actresses are able to create and capitalize on an image that they create of themselves, informs the possibility of a future in which the replication of the self will in fact be “the image of desired self.”
19.
Clay Walker | October 20, 2007 at 3:28 am
Mike: I agree that stem-cells hold a special place in the self/other dynamic, but rather than “the other other” I would argue that stem-cells are “the non other other.” Like organ transplants, they are ultimately a form of non-sexual reproduction – a re-embodiment of the subject – when (or if) they may result in the development of organs, cures, whatever. It is (perhaps potentially) a re-embodiment of the self that ultimately is certainly not the flesh of the self, but not exactly the flesh of the other, either. At the root of this issue is the question, what kind of subjectivity does a group of cells have? Do these cells constitute a body? Is there a self there there?
Jack: I locate my response with your opening paragrapher where you write: “By what discourse does [Doyle] have the right to conclude she would not have consented?” We have to turn back a page to find out.
Doyle: Thus while it is clear that the technologies of life support and the legal armature of brain death mark a decisive diagram of subjectivity – even in brain death, a subject persists, variously entangled with both the law and machines – comas also mark new configurations of power that emerge out of the ‘family’ (167).
To unpack: life support exends the capacities of the human body to embody a subjectivity via electronic reproduction of organ functions; thus death is complicated – “brain dead” “really dead” or “dead dead” (149); consequently the origin or locus (i.e., the body) and state of subjectivity is unclear, ambiguous, fraught, unstable, problematic; the subjectivity that does persist in the coma body, the body that should be dead without machines, remains as rooted in the body as it becomes rooted in machines and the law; therefore power (agency) re-situates itself from the fragile coma body/subject to the family. It is like the subjectivity has been downloaded as-if-it-were-software to the family who replace the fraught life-supported-comatose-body as the agent for the entangled subject.
The comatose body is problematized by its false (machinized) system of life-support (formerly biological) and subsequently the subjectivity of the self becomes equally problematized. There is no subjectivity with no living body.
Doyle writes earlier in the chapter on the Dockery family: “My point here is not that families should not be the locus of power in the complex economy of medicine and culture that surrounds the comatose patient. Rather, this medical and media episode highlihts the rather unstable character of the comatose body, a body for whom no medical distinctions appear adequate and whose diagnosis is rife with ambiguity. In this situation it is the ‘values’ of the patient’s family taht are called on to legitimate the governance of teh comatose subject, ‘values’ that also find litle strength in distinctions … the recourse to the family as a dite from which to govern the comatose body underscores the famlial disciplines that form the unspoken ground of contemporary health, health that ultimately fails or returns under the aegis of familial ‘care.’ If health is life lived in the silence of the organs, then the coma is a silent life sustained within the noise of familial discourse” (149, emphasis mine). To answer Jack’s question, the discourse is the familial discourse, the re-appropriated/downloaded/recovered/re-born subjectivity of the incapacitated/silent/life-supported/comatose body.
Kim: Cloning is another, interesting facet to this question of stem-cells. If stem-cells as some sort of apparatus for organ transplant is flesh of the non-other other, the clone would be the non-self self – DNA from the self exported and colonized in (perhaps) flesh of (an)Other?
20.
Jule | October 26, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Sorry this is soooo late. I ended up getting 4 teeth out and tissue grafting in my mouth. My bondy ridge and my molar and root/nerve was exposed due to the damage the wisdom teeth had created. I am still feeling shity and on antibiodics and vicadin sp?. So, will respond to something soon. Everytime I actually woke up, I didn’t even remember much of anything, esp. posting my response.
Jule Wallis- Wetwares
Richard Doyle’s new book Wetwares introduces the term “wetwares” as discursive and rhetorical strategies which are wrapped up with two questions that have been ongoing and unanswerable since the dawn of time: first, what does it mean when we say that something is alive, and second, when is it likely we will know we are alive? The answer to the first question can only ever occur in the future, which is to say that its deferral is part of its very nature. When will we know the mystery of life and how will we know the mystery of life when it presents itself? We will know in the future. Thus, for Doyle, life is the future and can only be fully formed and realized in the future.
As Michel Foucault explains in The Order of Things, nineteenth-century biology understood this life force as a “sovereign vanishing point within the organism” and thus, life could “reveal” itself only if it remained a mystery (and could only be explained by a handful of “knowing” subjects). Life always withdrew and disappeared into the recesses of the body, and from there it exerted a strong shaping force on modern philosophy.
What made it possible to open up the secret mysteries and thus sovereign control over life and the body? DNA. The search for the meaning of life consisted of ongoing and multifaceted questing/questioning since the enlightenment and has, according to modern scientists, finally been answered. But Doyle’s Wetwares complicated this ending, instead insisting that new stories and new mysteries are born out of the definition of life as DNA or information. Doyle further complicates the meaning of life by stating that DNA and science has not answered the fundamental and spiritual question of “what is life,” but has instead, through research, indicated that life is no more than code, ‘”nothing but information” (22).
If this is the case, then, how should we continue in the future? How then do we re-realize and define life? This question is absolutely central Wetwares and thus, for Doyle, the matter of ethics is implicitly invoked and examined by Doyle and others. Doyle’s ethical sidekicks are Deleuze and Guattari and William Burroughs, to name a few. It is Burroughs’ “shootist in training’” Kim Carsons in Place of the Dead Roads who best exemplifies for Doyle the kind of becoming Deleuze and Guattari envision in A Thousand Plateaus, where one must forget one’s subjectivity in order to transform, in order to integrate something alien into one’s experience/being. But Doyle has a specific level of forgetting which allows for a transformation into the sphere of the alien- a forgetting of one’s self that becomes “a summoning of alterity, the cultivation of a familiar” (4). Thus Carsons “must untie the knots between visuality, tactility, and temporality” and become “smeared” with the future in order to transform (6).
Yet, how do we transform ourselves towards into a being of the future? How do we “smear” ourselves into entanglements of information and multi-levels of consciousness? According to Doyle it is through an intense observation of the world, observation of consciousness in which the self dissolves into its objects of perception: “This accomplishment . . . involves a distributed agency—neither here nor there but an itinerant, diffuse sensitivity that enables objects to traverse the senses. The event of observation is less a passive reception than an incessant exposure to a swarm, a hospitality to the multiple ‘parts’ of an object” (15). In order to dissolve the self for the promise of the future, one must open up one’s perceptions and consciousness to the “rhizomes” of alterity. Or, one could simply imbibe pot or LSD!
In the rest of his book, Doyle investigates technologies which disrupt and combine the borders between carbon organisms and machines. In this way, the “smearing and smudging” of the border between carbon and machine life forms is most interesting and interactive for it is the site in which technology works upon us, and us upon it. Technology changes what/who we are- both physically and metaphysically. This, therefore, allows for a future of difference and becoming.
I have a few ethical questions of my own for Doyle. By becoming post-human, will we become ethical machines? How will this new energy and becoming be harnessed? Will we, if we follow this process, become Alba-like? And if so, who will have the control/power to mutate our genetic make up? Will we be appropriated as a living symbol of art and discourse? Not all of us will be able to engage in our own self experiment. Therefore, will one’s own subjectivity and “authentic” self be used and replicated and utilized in the capitalist market? Who will determine who is replicated or mutated? And finally, I find it perplexing, to say the least, that the subjects of mutation, at least in the readings for this week, tend to be female. Is this simply another subjectification of the female body- Alba, the female bunny, changed and mutated and manipulated for the sake of art, enjoyment, and rhetorical exchange?