Controversial Bodies: Thoughts on the Public Display of Plastinated Corpses

11. The Creeping Illusionizing of Identity from Neurobiology to Newgenics

105 chapter eleven The Creeping Illusionizing of Identity from Neurobiology to Newgenics barbara maria stafford, phd No, it had to be sweet as grass, the kind of stuff that’s habitforming like all things half-conceived: for instance, Adam anesthetized, and God, part surgeon, part cosmic dating service, taking her out for the first time to see how it would go (the Bible leaves this part out, although the Greeks not believing in premature withdrawal, left it in)! Eleanor Wilner, “Candied” BodyWorlds:TheAnatomicalExhibitionofRealHumanBodies— Gunther von Hagens’s hugely popular show of flying, jumping, chess-playing plastinates—has captured our attention at a peculiar moment in both the history of art and the progress of science. These “real human bodies” are rendered dry and odorless by a preservation process that replaces fluids with silicon rubber. Wet bodies and slimy organs look leathery and flexible. Because of their uniformly desiccated surfaces and the absence of both slipperiness and the stench of corruption, the treated bodies appear uncannily individual and ideal at the same time. Exhibiting human remains (ranked PG-13) has been a controversial and much debated practice, especially in the bioethical and 106 barbara maria stafford anthropological communities.1 These voided human specimens offer an occasion to reflect not only on the oddly depersonalized and distributed conception of the contemporary body but also on the irony that the real slides into the unreal when it is hygienically processed as if it were a computer-assisted vision. I propose the paradox that these hyper-real anatomies are unimaginable without the backdrop of new electronic media and the concept of both science and art as disembodied information that such imaging technologies foster. Significantly, and not unlike elaborate biomolecular procedures, the elaborate process of dismembering and then re-engineering formerly intact human specimens—so that they appear vertically “exploded ” or horizontally expanded (as in running) or enacting a role, such as a leaping ballet dancer or a dribbling basketball player— takes place primarily in remote facilities, in this case in China and Kyrgyzstan. Equally remote is the description of the complex preservation technique. For example, we are informed with clinical detachment , and without accompanying illustration, that the decomposition of the corpse is stopped with formaldehyde or freezing. It is “then either dissected or sawed into slices, depending on how it will be permanently preserved. Frozen body fluids are replaced by acetone in a frigid (minus 13 degrees) acetone bath. Most specimens, particularly bones and intestines, must be defatted in room temperature acetone before plastination can begin. In a vacuum chamber, the acetone is squeezed out of the specimen and gradually replaced by plastic,” with each whole body requiring “up to 1500 hours to prepare.” This passage is maddeningly vague, though precise.2 The explicit violence associated with the venerable tradition of the Western public autopsy—underlined in Vesalius’ disemboweled cadaver stretched out on the dissecting table in the frontispiece to his De humani corporis fabrica (1543)3 or sublimated in Frederik Ruysch’s late seventeenth-century allegorical tableaux of aborted fetuses dressed in the lace of their afterbirth—is still implicit here, but buried. As is true of biocomputing, the plastinates can theoretically be made of any material as long as certain principles are ful- The Creeping Illusionizing of Identity 107 filled. It just so happens that these particular artificial agents are compiled from human flesh. Such abstraction serves to detach the bodies we are looking at from the lengthy tearing down and building up material operations they underwent to achieve their final appearance . No wonder, then, that, despite their reality as technically accurate images, they do not possess the three-dimensionality, that is, the physical actuality and cognitive awareness, of seventeenthand eighteenth-century wax models from Zumbo to Fontana. No “I” or self-consciousness ever inhabited the trepanned cranium. The motion of the limbs still occurs automatically, even without the intervention of the will. Unlike the reanimation and re-formation promised at the Last Judgment, this collaging and montaging of stripped down bodies happens in silicon.4 Von Hagens, then, is very much of the tradition of Western art and very much of the moment in his deconstruction and reconstruction of organisms that are organic-inorganic chimeras.But he has nudged paradigms in both science and art, creating a strange and disorienting sense of creep. Creep, scientists tell us, is “the slow deformation of a material that occurs when it is...