READING THE

POSTMODERN

TECHNO-BODY

THE TECHNOLOGIZED HUMAN OR THE “CYBORG” IS BECOMING

increasingly visible in postmodernity with the acceleration of high-tech
body practices, such as those being undertaken in conventional medicine,
gene therapy, transsexual surgery, in vitro fertilization, cloning,
cosmetic surgery, pharmacological interventions, and so on. In addition,
the explosion of information technology, linked to what Mike
Featherstone calls “global compression,” has accelerated the possibilities
of exposure to “the various others around the world,” such that we
see increasing “mobility, movement, and border-crossing” of bodies
and identities.1 This mobility has ushered in a cultural relativism in the
West, such that classical ideals of the body are no longer unchallenged
as the only aesthetic option for embodiment. Together, these developments,
which find themselves so spectacularly expressed in street-level
and subcultural style as well as in high fashion, art, and medicine, are
forcing us at this historical moment to face the technologized and cultural
character of our bodies.2
Because of its theoretical access to material and representational technologies,
the postmodern body is often seen as unlinked from traditionalontologies and identities. Technology is often represented as a resource to
free us from what are seen as the natural constraints of the body, transforming
the body into a “purely discursive entity,” as Anne Balsamo puts
it. The limits of the embodied self, such that it must be connected to
place, that its movements and actions are limited to how much it can literally
shuffle itself back and forth in “real” space, that it can live only with
its birth-given organs and parts, visibly showing its age and background,
seem already outmoded in high-tech culture. Relatedly, technology has
also been imagined as freeing us of cultural constraints, so that the postmodern
body appears as a highly flexible, unmapped frontier upon
which an ontologically freed subject might explore and shift identities.
The body is theoretically freed then from its traditional miredness in the
cultural constructions of race, gender, and sexuality, among others. At its
most extreme, as Balsamo describes, this view sees a body reduced to its
surface, and ultimately, the disappearance of the body altogether, such
that we are left only with “designer subjectivities,” or self-created identities
that are “floating sign-systems” with no fixed meanings.3
A political reading of technologized bodies, though, problematizes a
view of the body as purely discursive as much as it problematizes one
of the body as purely “natural” or material. A feminist reading, for instance,
identifies constraints to subjectivity that are linked to the rootedness
of bodies in the material, lived realities of gender, race, and other
power relations. Unless race, class, and gender stratifications actually
disappear, individuals are limited in the ways in which they can imagine
themselves and shape their bodies and identities—even within a
culture that celebrates such choice and freedom. From a critical feminist
perspective, what might appear to be emerging freedoms offered
up by new technological practices are instead seen as new subject positions
forged within power relations, rather than outside them. Such a
reading would insist that technologized bodies are not outside of culture
and power, nor are they uniformly meaningful. Rather, bodies are
conceived, technologized, and debated within politically and socially
meaningful contexts by people who face different and multiple situa-tions of power. This renders postmodern bodies multiply, heterogeneously
significant.
Postmodern subjects are, for instance, differentiated in their acknowledgement
of, desire for, and embeddedness in sociality, which
Balsamo sees as linked to gender. In her analysis of Pat Cadigan’s science
fiction novel Synners (1991), Balsamo describes how male and female
cyberpunks interact with and conceive of technology in multiple
ways. For instance:
Where Sam hacks the net through a terminal powered by her own body,
Visual Mark actually inhabits the network as he mutates into a disembodied,
sentient artificial intelligence (AI). Although both Gina and
Gabe travel through cyberspace on their way to somewhere else, Gabe is
addicted to cyberspace simulations and Gina merely endures them.4
Balsamo differentiates the characters along gendered lines between
those that use technology to produce the “body-in-connection” (feminine)
and those that use it to produce the “body-in-isolation” (masculine).
Bodies seeking connection, as Balsamo has it, are bodies that
“actively manipulate the dimensions of cybernetic space in order to
communicate with other people.”5 The Synners characters, she argues,
are gendered in their relation to technology, such that while the females
use technology in ways that seek connection and link themselves to
others, the male characters “are addicted to cyberspace for the release it
offers from the perceived limitations of their material bodies.”6 Balsamo’s
point is that these differences—the individualism of male cyberpunk
and the sociality of female cyberpunk—show how broader
social relations like those of gender find themselves reflected in technologized
bodies and body projects. Women are encouraged to see
themselves and their bodies relationally, “in connection” to others,
while male socialization has been profoundly more individualistic, and
these differences influence the uses of, and ultimately the meanings of,
technologies. We might think about how technologies are employed
differently along such lines in real, rather than fictional, body projects;how they are gendered in terms of their framing and production in
connection with—or in isolation from—others.
As Balsamo points out, body technologies are differentiated because
of the various ways in which, to begin with, bodies are differentiated,
such as through their gendering. But body technologies are also differentiated
through the stratifications woven into the technologies themselves.
As critical scholars of technology have argued, the deployment
of technologies by individuals, groups, and nations both reflects and
creates privileges and constraints, and access to and control of technologies
are highly political matters. Technologies are high- or lowtech,
are outmoded or updated, are widely accessible or controlled by
experts. They are characterized by speed and acceleration, such that
some technological practices are inserted more quickly into the everchanging
matrix of culture, politics, and economy. In the age of information
overload, they are engaged in contests over the extent of
visibility and exposure, how they are sorted, and whether they surface
on the radar screens of culture. In the media-saturated environment of
postmodern culture, technological practices are linked to struggles over
framing and defining social problems and groups identities. They are
appropriated—as, for example, cyberpunks and performance artists
have appropriated cosmetic surgery—and they are reappropriated, for
example by the fashion and culture industries. Bodies become territories
for technological innovation, for politics and for trafficking goods,
and are fought over by social movements as well as medical, cosmetic,
fashion, and culture industries, among other interests.
These aspects of technological society—speed, exposure, and
processes of territorialization and reterritorialization—impact upon the
abilities of individuals and groups to define themselves and their bodies.
The ability to self-define is not only, then, about how flexible are bodies
and identities in postmodern societies. Rather, as technoscience feminist
Patricia Clough describes, “it is about negotiating with the speed of
movement as a way of knowing and not knowing, as a way of being and
not being exposed, over- and under-exposed.”7 Self-definition is linkedto technological power. From this perspective, body projects must be
conceived not only as planned or unplanned, conscious or unconscious
acts of the subject who negotiates among an increasing number of technological
and cultural options for body styles, self-definition, and group
identity. They must also been seen as practices that are cybernetic—
situated in a flow of images and information—and that may be unfixed
but are nonetheless socially stratified.8
The Italian social theorist Alberto Melucci describes how collective
action in the information age involves a whole host of acts of “challenging
codes.” By “codes” he means the agreed-upon meanings of bodies,
identities, and cultural and social issues. Challenging codes can
involve breaching the “limits of compatibility of the system of social relationships
within which the action takes place,”9 or pushing the limits
and boundaries set by established norms and social interests. There is a
whole range of codes challenged by the body art movement. Its display
of the spectacular body is created through the manipulation of primary
categories of identity—ethnicity, gender, and sexuality among them.
For instance, neo-tribal body art not only appears to represent political
affinity with indigenous cultures, but also poses ethnicity as an elective
identity for largely white, urban body-subjects. The use of deviant body
practices by women appears to subvert gendered norms of female docility
and beauty. Body modification is also perverse in its exploration of
sexuality. The affective pleasures of body modification breach the ways
sexuality is ordered in heteronormative culture. Such infractions are
“inventions,” in Foucault’s sense of the word, because they break the
orderedness/ordinariness of bodies and pleasures.10
But the radicalism of body modifiers is limited by social forces—sometimes
the very same forces they seek to oppose, including patriarchy, Western
ethnocentrism, symbolic imperialism, pathologization, and
consumerism. Even the most radical body art does not rescue the body
from these. Radical body artists, for instance, share with consumer capitalism
an interest in the ever-changeable inscription of the body. In other
ways, too, rebellious body projects echo powerful historical regimes. In thedeployment of images of the primitive, for instance, we see an ironic, powerfully
symbolic tactic, but also uncertain and problematic political effects.
The “primitive” as described here, despite the stated aims of
neotribal body modifiers themselves, remains an image of colonialism:
nostalgic and characterized as natural, uncivilized, sexualized, and wholly
Other. Thus, the intentions of body artists are limited in how much they
themselves produce the meanings of their practices. Bodies and technologies
are not ever fully authored by individual subjects, but are always experienced
and understood through the historical forces that shape them.
Body technologies, including those that are said to express selfnarration,
have methods and speeds of representation and selfrepresentation
that express cultural capital, resources and status. As
Melucci argues, in the high-tech world empowerment is often a matter
of controlling knowledge, and disempowerment is often lack of
control over the creation of meaning, or dependence in the flow of information.
11 These stratifications not only reflect our subject positions
within relations of power, but, as Clough argues, also participate in
creating them. As Clough describes, categories like race and gender are
not givens, “not simply matters of identity and surely not of authentic
subject identity.”12 Instead, we need to think about how they are continually
constructed through body practices and the inscriptions of
culture, which in postmodern societies are linked to the media and
culture industries, to information technology, and to economic and
political relations. Some bodies, such as those of women and people of
color, are more vulnerable to “territorialization” than others, to underexposure
(in terms of their own definitions of self ) or overexposure (in
terms of their usefulness as spectacles and commodities). This means
that political struggles now involve “the when, where or how of acknowledging,
elaborating, resisting or refusing,” as Clough puts it, the
ways in which bodies and identities are coded within high-tech and
consumer culture.13 The “when, where, and how” of participating in
how one’s identity is marked and produced is precisely what is at stake
for all of us as we participate regularly in body projects, radical or so-cially acceptable. What a critical perspective on body projects points
to is how our bodies and identities are constructed and reconstructed
with differing levels of technological access, speed, and visibility in a
postmodern and transnational, but highly stratified, social world.
Body projects can be seen to highlight how self-narration is linked
to techno-representational access. Body art practices link the denatured
body to the subject who can choose her identity. The practices are informed
by a sense of freedom or liberation that is accomplished by the
breakdown of both the material and the symbolic limits of the body.
As it breaks down borders and speeds up the traffic of information,
representation, and bodies, however, technology not only increases possibilities
of claiming and naming identity for those who find themselves
so positioned, but also decreases the chances of self-definition for others.
Virtual technologies, medical technologies, and technologies of representation
are now among the methods of trafficking and producing
identities and bodies across cultural boundaries. Cosmetic surgeries,
botox and collegen injections, endlessly paraded in the media as part of
the high-tech beauty ideal, are among the “medical” technologies on
offer by high-tech consumer culture. The Internet offers space—
through chat rooms, personal web pages, and digital photographs—to
imagine and play out cyberidentities, as well as to surf the world’s fashions,
cultures, and styles for an astonishing range of information about
bodies, from medical to cultural to spiritual. “Multicultural” fashion
spreads, televised National Geographic, and the Travel Channel bring us
exotic images of indigenous Africans, Asians, and others, while news
programs, talks shows, MTV, and “reality” cop shows present people of
color at home in variously sensationalized and damaging ways. These
representations and technologies can all be used as resources for identification,
but the ability to participate in creating the meanings of these
is a function of power, to which people have widely differential access.
In the consumer model, self-narration is a highly personal matter,
where shopping for identity and style is an individual’s primary expression
of freedom. A critical reading, however, must insist that thefashioning of the body is always a social and political process, rather
than one of individual choice and persona. In this view, the technologies
of body projects are forms of cultural capital. “Technologies” here
would not mean only the literal, materially transforming practices,
such as the cosmetic surgery in Orlan’s “Reincarnation” and the digital
technology in her “Self-Hybridation,” but also the technologies of
making visible her body art projects, and of speeding up her identity
“shopping.” What Orlan accomplishes, beyond reshaping the material
body, is the appropriation of various images of bodies of multiple cultures
and epochs, as well as an ability to create a public spectacle, to
be seen. What privileges does Orlan take in representing the bodies of
indigenous people (in “Self-Hybridation”)? What privileges does she
challenge when she uses cosmetic surgery in ways that would shock
most surgeons and the culture industries that champion such practices
(in “Reincarnation”)? How does being a woman and also a white
Western European with a great deal of technological resources affect
her ability to name and rename herself and define her bodily boundaries?
What speeds of access, degrees of exposure, and points of representational
insertion and interruption in the trafficking of images of
various bodies are accomplished? How do they insert themselves, or
make themselves visible, and at what speed, in the flow of “codes” or
information that inform the lives and mark the bodies of women, people
of color, radical queers, and others? How, and when, are these technologies
of meaning themselves interrupted? When we can think of
body art projects as processes of asserting, contesting, and appropriating
various forms of privilege, we can ask these questions of them.
Thus, in critically thinking through how body projects and technobodies
are differentiated, we can focus on a number of lines of stratification,
including how they reflect or achieve: access to the flow of
information, or the ability to navigate cultural systems to “borrow” images
from multiple cultural options; visibility, or to what extent they
command the social gaze in one’s direction; speed, or the rate at which
they can accomplish all this; and also how they are gendered in theirdeployment of access, visibility, and speed along the lines of connection
and isolation, to the extent that they acknowledge their social situatedness,
their social and political linkages.
I see women’s reclaiming projects, for instance, as interrogations of
the individual body’s ownership and governance, but also as ritualized
in practices that both literally gather women together and mark
women’s collective position in gendered relations of dominance and violation.
14 Thus, these are body projects that put women in connection
with each other, that make social what might have otherwise been
solely private and silent sufferings, and that insist upon a political and
to some extent “visible” reading of bodily and sexual victimization.15 In
reclaiming projects, agency is conceptualized as surmounting internalized
oppression, perceiving that oppression as political rather than personal,
and healing with the help of others.
I would also describe agency in these instances as the practice of
commanding the social gaze, including the clinical gaze, such that the
insertion of women’s own meanings of surviving victimization usurp, at
least temporarily, the experts’ role in naming women’s bodies—as in
defining beauty, or diagnosing and treating victims. The task of
“put[ting] symbols on our bodies to show that in fact we have been actively
involved in taking our power back,” to quote the tattoo artist
Lamar Van Dyke, involves interrupting the circuits of meaning in what
Melucci would call “symbolically wasteful” ways. “Symbolic wastefulness”
is the ability to slow down the circuits of information flow, to interrupt
the meanings being generated, to force a gaze upon oneself in
ways that breach the system’s symbolic limits. As he describes it,
[symbolic wastefulness] serves . . . as the expression of an irreducible difference,
of what is “valueless” because it is too minute or partial to enter
the standardized circuits of the mass cultural market. The symbolic extravagance
of female output [in cultural practices of the women’s movement]
introduces the value of the useless into the system, the inalienable
right of the particular to exist, the irreducible significance of inner times
which no History is [otherwise] able to record. . . . 16When women engage in anomalous body projects, meanings can be
produced outside of what is functional, efficient, or otherwise fruitful
for the social order. The circulation of norms can be, at least temporarily,
interrupted, so that the ordinary relations of power over
women’s bodies, including those governing beauty, consumption,
health and mental health, are challenged. The minute, partial, marginal
“inner” histories of women’s bodies can be made visible and inserted
into the flow of information, such that the dominant ideologies are
forced to confront their subjugated knowledges.
Modern primitivist projects, which sometimes overlap with reclaiming
projects but are also uniquely deployed (often by straight,
white men), also produce symbolic wastefulness, but I find them more
masculinist, to use Balsamo’s understanding, in terms of their nonrecognition
of connectedness. Modern primitivism emphasizes the
global connection of bodies, the meeting of cultures, and the historical
roots of all humans in tribal societies. To the extent that this represents
connection, though, it is an ideal of connection that is not
reflected in existing global cultural politics. Modern primitives participate
in the historical, global economies of representation, which are
highly stratified between producers and consumers, such that white
Westerners have more technological access in terms of generating cultural
meanings and defining selves and groups than those whom they
seek to emulate. Melucci writes of such groups,
The true exploitation is not the deprivation of information; even in the
shantytowns of the cities of the Third World people are today are exposed
to the media, only they do not have any power to organize this
information according to their own needs. Thus, the real domination is
today the exclusion from the power of naming.17
Ironically, the production of the modern primitive depends upon a
sense of elective identity unfettered not only by one’s personal or collective
social history, but also by the cultural hierarchies within the
“power of naming.” In its refusal to acknowledge the relational politicsof identity and meaning production, modern primitivism embraces a
“body-in-isolation.” Like cyberpunk, modern primitivism is a trope of
postmodern liberalism: we can be who we want to be, personal and social
history notwithstanding.
Although as a feminist I want to privilege notions of the body that
offer possibilities of recognizing others and their relatedness to ourselves
rather than those that do not recognize them, there are no fixed, guaranteed
political meanings generated out of either conception. These notions
of the body, as connected and isolated, located and dislocated,
traffic across cultural sites in multiply significant ways, and I would argue
that myths are operating on both ends. I hope that bodies-in-connection
have the potential to produce a politics of recognition, such that technologies
of representation are linked to their larger historical, social,
and/or political contexts. Such recognition is generated, for instance, in
the anti-globalization movement when consumer bodies (those that wear
Nike shoes and the Gap clothing of urban and suburban America) are
linked to the laboring bodies of exploited women, men, and children.
The recognition of our linked histories and futures may be required for
any democratic attempt at sharing cultural, technological, and social resources,
and for creating the conditions that might allow us to use body
technologies in ways that multiply our existential possibilities rather than
further stratify us culturally, economically, and socially. The danger of
connectedness, of course, is that such a vision can easily contain essentialist
myths, such as that women are really “one body,” a distinct class
with a defined set of bodily and social values and needs, as radical feminists
have asserted (or that we are all really “primitives” underneath).18 In
working out the unification of women (or other groups) based on such
unitary notions of the body and subject, we can problematically naturalize
our bodies and ontologies, infusing them with dominant values to the
detriment and marginalization of others.
Bodies-in-isolation, alternatively, are born out of an individualism that
celebrates disconnection, distinction, and difference. Sometimes Romantic,
other times meritocratic or even social Darwinian, bodies-in-isolationare underwritten with a myth of non-locatedness, the dream of freedom
from the tethers of body, culture, group identity, and history. The bodyin-
isolation is, of course, a privileged body. Such a refusal to recognize the
social, economic, and political links that tie us together, and that inform
our body technologies, encourages the myths of individualism that makes
consumer capitalism so appealing to so many. The “right” to individuality,
to standing alone, negotiating to get one’s own, self-defined needs met
through technological access, is a powerful force operating in the world of
body technologies and one that is much broader than I have addressed in
this book. It is the source of a great deal of the ethical crises in biotechnology,
in cloning and “designer genes,” in increasingly popular cosmetic
surgeries, in increasingly high-tech, expensive, and economically stratified
health care. Enough cannot be said, in my opinion, about the problems
of individualism when it comes to such issues, especially since what are ultimately
at stake in body technologies are not only appearance, style, and
identity, but also material and cultural survival, human equality and dignity.
For instance, the increasingly high-tech quest for beauty in the
United States, and even our hailing of expensive, high-tech medical breakthroughs
that will prolong life for the few who will have access, are part of
a global stratification of economies, technologies, and health resources
that also include health crises of astonishing proportions. Many of these,
such as starvation and malnutrition, do not necessarily require high-tech,
but rather political and economic, solutions; others involve redrawing
rights of ownership to life-prolonging drugs, such as in the controversy
over the use of AIDS drugs in poor nations.19 The framing of technologies
as individualized problem-solvers and as producers of individualized
bodies and identities comes, I think, at great social and ethical expense in
the context of a world that contains both impressive bodily luxury and
great bodily suffering.
The “postmodern” bodily style of flexibility and choice is part of a
larger capitalist-driven ideology of consumption, and this is partly what
gives the global stratifications of economies and technologies their
means and justification. What I have tried to show in this book,though, is how the Western flexible body, or the body-seen-as-project,
described here in one of its more startling subcultural permutations, is
saturated with political meanings and is symbolically, culturally, and
even materially stratified. It is differentiated by these stratifications, and
so the flexible postmodern body is really many bodies and deployments
of body technologies. The flexible body is a body of privilege. At the
same time, under consumer capitalism, it is a body under contract, so
to speak, to produce its own identity through consumption practices.
So how the body is composed can become a matter of recognition and
non-recognition, avowal and disavowal of its social and political meanings
and consequences.20 One promise of dislocating the body-subject
from the most sedimented of cultural meanings might be that she
could disavow categories of identity that have primary roles in cultural
stratification, that she might symbolically invert or overturn the naturalization
of the body, or that she might queer ontologies that participate
in producing the stratification of bodies/selves across naturalized
lines of race, gender, and ethnicity. And so, such bodies—such cyborgs
and monsters, in Donna Haraway’s terms—remain in some ways rebellious,
unfixed, unclosed to possibilities that might be contained
within and without them. They fiddle with cracks in technology’s stratified
systems of function, purpose, and ownership. Perhaps they open
paths for other challenges to myths of bodily integrity, identity’s nature,
and technological expertise. The body technologies described here—
technologies that are deployed to queer the body—also queer technology
in terms of its expertise and purpose.21 Such bodies are disruptive
not because they are wholly unintelligible, but because they remain
partly unintelligible while also speaking the common language of consumption,
flexibility, and technological invention/intervention. They
are haunted with ordinary relations of power while they so spectacularly
contest them.