Cyborgs: Body Machines and Machine Bodies

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dominant discourses on the theories of the speaking subject. As a fundamental realization it has been established by postsemiotics that the theories of the ontology and the production of meaning cannot be content with the abstraction provided by the transcendental ego of phenomenology. This abstraction neglects to contextualize the speaking subject within the material conditions, the actual social constraints and the corporeal determinations of meaning production, and, because of its embeddedness in an ideological tradition, it does not go beyond the limitations of the Cartesian subject of Western metaphysics.¹⁶¹ The theoretization of the corporeality of the subject has also become indispensable because the body is the most ―tangible‖ meeting point of the two great theoretical shifts that emerged by the mid 1970s: the linguistic and the visual turn. The two critical turns had different receptions chronologically, but they both decanonized with equal intensity the reigning theoretical assumptions, resulting in a new account of the relationship between subject and meaning.

The theoretical concentration on the body intensified the affinity for such parallelisms in the semiotics and the typology of culture which we can now investigate without the simplifications or universalizations characteristic of earlier structuralist or organicist models. The epistemology of the complex constitution of the subject has become, for example, one of the most important points of connection in the attempts to map out the analogies and parallels between the early modern and the postmodern period. My focus on the similarities in the representational techniques of early modern and postmodern dramas aimed at bringing these analogies to light. The unsettling of the medieval concept of the body was followed by its becoming heterogeneous and intriguing in the early modern period, and its being suppressed and ignored in the age of the

161 Kristeva writes about the philosophies of language that are still based on the phenomenological abstraction of the Cartesian ego as follows: ―…static thoughts, products of a leisurely cogitation removed from historical turmoil, persist in seeking the truth of language by formalizing utterances that hang in midair, and the truth of the subject by listening to the narrative of a sleeping body - a body in repose, withdrawn from its socio-historical imbrication, removed from direct experience.‖

Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 13. In order to go beyond phenomenology, Kristeva actually lays down the foundations of postsemiotics by announcing the program of semanalysis, which aims at giving an account of the psychosomatic complexity of the subject.

Enlightenment. The process leads to one of the main traumatic points in the unfinished project of modernity, to the reemerging of the body as a presence which is impossible to erase. We can arrive at a more accurate view of the postmodern body through understanding the early modern epistemological and theological - thanatological crisis. The body is shining in front of us again with an intensity that produces an effect comparable to its first appearances on the dissection tables of the Renaissance anatomists, or behind the perspectographs of the early modern painters.

From the scene of dramas and theatrical representations I move in the present analysis to another mode, that of the filmic representation, which is perhaps the most powerful type of semiosis in our age. The corporeal turn has been as spectacularly present in postmodern cinema as the anatomized body was all-pervasive in the early modern public and anatomical theaters. Postmodern films tend to represent the body as the body of the scopophylic subject-spectator, together with its relations to the social context and the camera perspective, and then these relations are interpreted by postmodern directors as hierarchic systems of dependence. Matuska Ágnes has recently argued that we can gain significant insight from a comparative and contrastive analysis of postmodern film and early modern revenge tragedy when we are interpreting the thematizations of the body in the Kill Bill films by Tarantino.¹⁶² In her article Matuska detects analogies between the dramaturgy of Renaissance revenge plays that thematize the fusion of epistemological borderlines, and the Kill Bill films which unsettle the sharp separations of reality – fiction – metafiction. In my analysis here I set out to investigate a film by a director who, in my understanding, has also been paying

162 Matuska Ágnes. ―A fikció szentsége: a Kill Bill és a reneszánsz bosszúdráma-hagyomány.‖

Apertúra 2006 Tél (2. szám) (http://www.apertura.hu/2006/tel/matuska; access: January 30, 2010).

Matuska argues that the ―theatrum mundi‖ tradition had serious epistemological consequences in the thought of the Renaissance since it blurred the borderlines that were supposed to separate reality from fiction.

the most systematic attention to the problematic and fuzzy nature of such borderlines and thresholds of meaning and experience.

It would be difficult to recall a film from the mid-1990s with as great an effect as the controversy and critical debate provoked by the Canadian director David Cronenberg‘s Crash.¹⁶³ The opening night was repeatedly put off because of the passionate protests staged by conservative North American opponents.

Masses of people walked out from the first screenings, and, at the same time, masses of people celebrated with loud ovation the daring, experimental, perverse, sharp and witty cinematic language which, by that time, was actually quite typical of Cronenberg. The film is an adaptation of the borderline – sci-fi – pornographic novel by the British writer James Ballard (1973). In the film, the protagonist called James Ballard (James Spader) is accompanied by his wife Catherine (Deborah Unger) in a journey of discovering analogies and connections between the body of machines and the machineries of bodies, between car crashes and erotic excitement, corporeal mutilation and sexual drive energy. In their quest they are guided and assisted by the fanatic Vaughan (Elias Koteas) who photographs crashes and reconstructs famous accidents with live participants, and leads the couple into the somewhat visionary or hallucinatory body-discoveries that are frighteningly bizarre in the beginning, and irresistibly tempting later on.

In comparison to the original Ballard novel, Cronenberg provides a very restrained, almost chilly and bare visual version, yet his critics accused him of being immoral and perverse. Regardless of the controversial critical reception, the film has become a memorable production especially because of the masterly performance by Koteas.

Of course, by the time of the introduction of Crash in 1996, the concept of the machine body had become a thoroughly thematized and investigated issue of

163 Claude Lalumière, for example, writes in January Magazine in February 2000: ―I find nothing to admire in Cronenberg‘s posturing, safe, elegant, depoliticized, de-intellectualized and coldly humorless reading of Crash.‖ (http://www.janmag.com/artcult/crash.html; access: October 16, 2009.)

critical theory in general, and of cultural studies, film theory and postsemiotics in particular. By then, Donna Haraway had already written the Cyborg-manifesto,¹⁶⁴ and the testing and questioning of the epistemological borderline between the machine and the organism had become an established practice not only in sci-fi theories, but also in the recent cultural theories which embedded the question in the broader semiotico-philosophical discourse on the body. The early reactions to the film are loaded with arrogant, outraged, annoyed and quite offended tones, enlisting charges against the production that range from immoral perversion through bestiality to boring stupidity. These reactions rely on the assumption that one generalization is sufficient to describe the totality of the film: an assumption that, in fact, the producers were actually also afraid of.¹⁶⁵ The more analytical and theoretical parts of the criticism aim at interpreting the film in the light of the earlier productions by Cronenberg, usually focusing on the themes of virtual- or hyperreality, abjection and the idea of the cyborg. They consider the cosmos of Crash as a manifestation of the surface mechanisms of that consumer society of high capitalism which has lost any feeling of depth, and in which the possibility of a direct, immediate experiencing of reality is irreparably taken away from the human being by the machine or the automobile, which gets inserted between the human body and reality. The reality which is experienced through the automobile in the film is reigning as a virtual reality, and the practices of mutilation, demolition, torture and violence, the aesthetics of the wound and the psychosomatic effect of abjection upon the subject all aim at breaking through this virtuality.

164 Donna Haraway. ―A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.‖ In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-181.

165 ―In a recent interview to an Italian magazine, the director has explicitly said that his American producer ―is afraid.‖ Afraid of what? Of the fact that the movie develops the theorem: car crash

= death = mutilation = sexual excitement; surely a singular theory, but it seems to me that anybody has a right to his own tastes, or not?‖ Vittorio Curtoni. ―The Cronenberg Syndrome.‖

(http://www.agonet.it/cafe/dada/ dada8/ar1_8.htm, access: October 24, 2009.)

However, in spite of the various interpretations relying on the theories of the abject, most of these approaches stop at the point of merely listing the effects of the different bodily fluids, sexual transgressions and mutilations, without discussing the agency of the abject in light of the fact that, in almost all of his films, Cronenberg systematically thematizes the transgression of the borderlines which constitute structures, or the violations of the surfaces that separate us from the threatening, unstructured Other.

The paradigmatic questioning of thresholds has been observed by some critical analyses in Cronenberg‘s works. The film eXistenZ can be approached on the basis of Haraway‘s ideas about the fusion of the borderlines between reality and virtuality, organic and mechanical, human and machine. Virilio‘s thesis on the postmodern ecstasy of velocity and Baudrillard‘s ideas about hyperreality and virtuality can also be applied together with the problematization of bodily horror.

In opposition to these readings, however, I contend that Cronenberg is not trying to establish a sensationalist representation of horror. Instead, he uses the themes and images of sexuality, body horror, body machine and machine body in order to transgress or blur the borderlines between structures, and, through the meticulous examination of the moment of such border-crossings he aims at dislocating the identity position of the receiver. It is in this deployment of the effect where Cronenberg succeeds in giving an account of the mechanism of the effect of the abject.

Ágnes Matuska has already observed the similarities between early modern revenge tragedy and Tarantino‘s Kill Bill films. I maintain that the testing of borderlines is a common representational technique shared by early modern theatrical and postmodern cinematic representations. Abjection is not staged ―just like that‖ in Renaissance revenge tragedy, either. Mutilated bodies, body parts chopped off and dispatched as letters, and decaying victims are again and again the focus of early modern anatomizing attention because these representations try

to give an account of the transition from life to death, from meaningful to unmeaningful, from structured to unstructured. More precisely, they aim at representing the prolonged investigation of the moment of such transitions. Under the effects of reformed theology and the new forms of subjectivity, the medieval tradition of the ars moriendi starts being questioned, and the human being‘s relation to death becomes an epistemological problem; it turns into a thanatological crisis. Hieronimo is crying from the depths of utter mental disintegration, Hamlet should long be stiff dead, Othello has already lost all his reserves of blood, Lavinia should long be a decaying cadaver; nevertheless, all these characters are still scrutinizing the mysteries of human existence through various refined methods of signification or in long monologues, swinging back and forth on the threshold separating life from death. This swinging, this oscillation between the borderlines that separate structures is thematized in Cronenberg‘s films through the emblems of a postmodern ars moriendi. Crash is part of this thematization, where the automobile does not get simply inserted between the human body and nature. Rather, it carries upon itself the human body and thus it becomes the surface, the borderline of the body, in order for the human being to experience the story of his or her own insatiable desire on its glassy, metallic surfaces.