http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/zkp/bodycoun.txt From : Critical Art Ensemble Date : November 1995 Body Count (short non-performative version) One of the characteristics of ideology is that it universalizes the particular. That is, the perceptions and desires of a particular empowered group are re-presented as the perceptions and desires of everyone within its realm of domination. The historical traces of nationalized ideology are still functioning, even in the most technologically sophisticated countries; hence ideology itself is susceptible to particularisms in spite of dominant global economy. Consequently, ideological systems manifest themse lves in different ways, and present to their citizens different forms of spectacle. However, the element common to all these situations is the universalization of authoritarianism. My hope is that we can all come together on this international issue, and through it, find a common ground for communication. At the same time, I must reassert that the spectacle that informs my everyday life is not the same spectacle to be found here. The strategies that I use as an artist and as an activist to resist ideological imperatives are also specific and may not be of use in this territory. For this reaso even if my rhetoric gets a bit overzealous, I want to emphasize that I am not speaking for or generalizing about the situation in Eastern Europe. I am speaking from the particularized position of an American engage d in the struggle against authoritarianism. What I do hope will happen in the course of this screening and lecture is that we can begin to construct a comparative study of resistant strategies and tactics bound by our solidarity against totalitarianism, w herever we find it. The first body type that we would like to discuss is one that arises out of the apparatus of repression. We know this apparatus through the institutions of the police, the military, national guards, and intelligence agencies. The evolution of this apparat us has been based on the quality of speed. The faster the violence, the greater its intensity. The quicker force can be deployed, the more effective it is. The faster a force can move, the larger the territory it can maintain and manage. Unfortunately, th e organic body was not designed to be a high-velocity body. It had to be remade in the mold of the corporate/military blitzkrieg. In the upcoming video on the repressive apparatus, the first and perhaps the most profound of the body types appears-the mili tarized body. This is the first form of the cyborg-a second order cyborg in which removable technology has been fixed to the human to expand the possibility for destruction. The armies of the world are filled with those who want to become killing machines , but another consequence even more frightening begins to occur. In the age of the cyborg, the nonrational elements of humanity are factored out of the equation. War is no longer war, but virtual battle, in which the combatants see one another only as dig ital abstractions. This situation has made its way down into the marketplace. For example, virtual sex, erotica, phone sex, etc. take the place of sexuality itself. The two most intimate points of human life, aggression and passion, have been reduced to a utomatic experience. Show Speed and Violence (tape 1) **************** I think that it is safe to assume that pancapitalism functions on a premise of over-production. For profits to increase, production must rise far beyond necessity. When profits come to a level of obscene accumulation, they must be burnt off in spectacles of frantic excess and extreme uselessness. In the US, a prime example of burning off profits in useless constructions is the American Intercontinental Missile system. The function of this system is to never be used. If it becomes useful, it has failed, or so the plan of "mutually assured destruction" tells us. To make sure it remains useless, it is constantly upgraded and perfectly maintained-no expense is spared. Since the fall of the Soviet empire, there is really no place to even aim the missiles, and hence the system has transcended itself and evolved into an even higher realm of uselessness. Frantic excess is the burning off of profits in war. Nothing will stimulate an economy like a good killing spree-hence the US aggression against such military gi ants as Haiti, Grenada and Panama. For these activities of destruction, the killing machines are needed; however, to build the profits necessary to carry out such sacrifice, a different machine is needed-the consuming machine. To create such a machine, an body image is needed that does not really exist in the realm of the organic-a vision that cannot be physically replicated, no matter how much labor power is expended, no matter how much profit is spent. In the US, the body without organs (referred to hereafter as the BwO) has been created. This is a body that only exists in the moment of telepresence; a body that is only a surface mediated by the screen. The BwO thrives on a peculiar structuring of contradictory motivations. On one hand, the similarity of the morphology of the BwO to our own produces sympathy within us and a desire to be like it. On the other hand, the BwO produces intense jealous y within us. We cannot be like it, nor can we escape the predicament of mortality that the BwO has escaped. Jealousy and sympathy entwine to produce that perfect feeling of deprivation-the feeling that we must have something we don't really need. The stro nger these feelings, the more willing one is to be programmed as an extreme consumer. We are also warned by the BwO that if we do not reduce ourselves to the surface of consumption, that the mortality of the organic will come oozing forth. The anti-BwO is always represented in horror films and in comedies of humiliation for this very reason. Show BwO ************************ The reactions to the BwO tend to vary. One of the more paradoxical is the buffed or hard body. It is difficult to be sure whether these gymnasium devotees are attempting to reestablish the primacy of the organic body, or if they have only found their nic he in the matrix of consumption. Nor can one be sure whether they are organic parodies of a first order cyborg, or if they truly believe that the organic body can be made to do what a body of mechanical and electronic extension is capable of doing. This group has refused the desire for disembodiedment. While pleasure may not be their first concern, they are sensualists. They like to feel the body. To feel it hurt. To feel it strengthen. To feel it heal. There is a peculiar return to essentia lism in their demand for the primacy of the body. The body is more than just a social text; it is also the locus for reality. Show Philosophy in the Nautilus Room (tape 3) ******************* For every cult willing to embrace the primacy of the body and other organic essentialisms, there are those who revel in the recombinant qualities of the body as social text. The body can be inscribed with ever shifting sign systems continuously transformi ng the presentation of identity and role with every new situation. The question is, where do these social texts come from? Are they predetermined for the consumer or are they the affirmation of individual desire? Paradoxically both possibilities seem true . The desire to reassign one's gender is certainly categorized as deviant by the defenders of the status quo. Nothing jumbles bureaucratic records more than such fundamental shifts in being. Gender, of all things, should be stable from the bureaucratic pe rspective. In light of this situation, gender bending seems to have liberatory consequences. One divorces oneself from one's files, and follows one's own desire. On the other hand, if the body is a transforming entity, and gender is an ascribed textuality , a gender sign must precede the expectation of the individual for it to be understood as a signifier of gender. Consequently, the individual is only changing from one predetermined text to another. Is there really a difference between Coke and Pepsi? Is the choice between these two options really a choice at all? Does selecting Pepsi over Coke really represent indi vidual choice? In the following video, CAE presents the queen of anti-essentialism, transsexual Toni Denise. On one hand, she is radicalized, in the sense that she refused to let biology be her destiny. On the other hand, her goals in life are to be the girl nex t door-to perfectly blend with the consumer excess of suburbia-and to be the perfect desire machine for men. Certainly her conception of being a woman is rather reductive, and skewed toward the masculine. What is being colonized and what is being liberate d in this situation? Toni is a first order cyborg-her situation cannot be reversed. She has surgically stopped the sign flow. In contrast to her are those who bend gender through performance. By modifying expression, costume, and gesture, they become what they wish to be. The recombinant pattern flows ever onward. The following is a modest foretaste of the virtual body that is to come. Show Gender Crash (tape 4) ********************** The virtual body is a matter of speculation. Certainly it is the body with which we have the least experience. There seems to be two varieties, one which is clearly repressive and the other which tends toward liberation. The first, we know as the data bod y. Unlike the more liberatory virtual body, the data body is in no way limited by the corporate promises and futurologists predictions. The data body is here and now, complete and functioning. It is alive in cyberspace. The data body is the collection of digital files that validates the social existence of an individual. This body explains to others in officialdom who we are. The social being of an individual is determined by these files, and the individual is helpless to contradict this body of informat ion. Further, individuals cannot control their own data body: They do not know where it travels, nor to whom it speaks. Tragically, it speaks louder than its organic counterpart. To control the data body is to control the person, and this is one key to t he power of the elite of the virtual class. Show Data Body (tape 5) ***************************** But there is another virtual body out in the electronic ether. Hopefully one that we can control. On this body we can reinscribe our flesh with whatever coding system we desire. We can try on new body configurations. We can experiment with immortality by going places and doing things that would be impossible in the physical world. For this virtual body, nothing is fixed and everything is possible. Indeed, this is the reason we hear of hackers wishing to become a disembodied consciousness flowing freely th rough cyberspace, willing the idea of their own body and environment. This potential utopia is a place where equations of freedom can be tested, but as yet it is still only a testing ground. After all, we must always reembody, and let's face it, VR has no t evolved much beyond basic GUI systems that are based on the overly simplistic formula of stimulus, response, reward or punishment. VR is still very far from a multi-sensual reality replication. The experiment that we consider in the following video is what would happen if the tongue located itself in different areas of the body. What would speech, taste, and oral sexuality become if the tongue could nomadically wander about the body, tak ing up residence where it saw fit? What would the language of the toes, the breasts, or the anus be if the tongue stopped at these locations and began to speak? In the realm of the virtual body we can begin to investigate these matters, or at least waste some time on speculative folly. Show Tongue Spasms (Tape 6) ************************** Fin # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de