Controversial Bodies: Thoughts on the Public Display of Plastinated Corpses

1. Being Non-biodegradable: The Lonely Fate of Metameat

17 chapter one Being Non-biodegradable The Lonely Fate of Metameat catherine belling, phd There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Mr. McGuire in The Graduate (1967) The preservation of human bodies by plastination converts humans into objects.These dead people do not appear to decay, and so we are protected, despite the graphic exposure of their insides , from the physical revulsion we might expect to feel in the presence of human remains. Whether we understand these objects as biological specimens or as aesthetic creations, or both, their explicit resistance to decomposition tells us, on a visceral level, that they are something other than human remains. As such, they are also no longer subject to the special regard that is always entailed by horror. Many objections to the Body Worlds exhibitions seem to turn on the distinction between science and art.1 If we think of the plastinates as specimens, we imagine observing them dispassionately and with control. If we imagine them as works of art, we risk acknowledging the pleasure that looking at them makes us feel, and such pleasure might remind us of the horror it has replaced. Instead, we try to focus on the improving effects of our seeing. It is morally justifiable , the argument in its crudest form goes, to turn a human being into a dissected display in order to further objective factual knowledge about the body and to disseminate that knowledge to the public . Democratic science education is a legitimate, indeed required, 18 catherine belling by-product of science. A more pragmatic justification rests on the public health benefit that Von Hagens claims will follow from seeing the causes of death in the bodies themselves. This revelation is expected to promote a self-policing inward gaze in viewers who, having seen the inner lesion—the smoke-blackened lung or sclerotic artery—will, it is argued, work harder at their own wellness disciplines . Donors are expected to become posthumous object lessons. But plastinates are never, strictly speaking, posthumous. They have foregone the transition of burial—the“inhumation”from which “posthumous” takes its literal meaning—or equivalent sociocultural rituals marking the end of a body’s life and situating that body, as a material object, apart from the physical space of the living. Loved ones will go to great lengths to retrieve the material remains of their dead in order to dispose of those remains appropriately, to enact the performative acknowledgment both of what they have become and of what they were before. A memorial service without a corpse is not the same thing as a funeral. It is about memory and closure, but not about matter. Knowing their bodies will be transformed into museum exhibits, how do the loved ones of plastination donors expect to remember them? Plastination elides the cultural signs we attach to human remains. We exclude corpses from the presence of the living, abjecting them— casting them out—and simultaneously marking them as special, as sacred. Plastinates instead are allowed to remain, uncovered, in the physical presence of the living. We move among them, and no matter how sincere our admiration or reverence or absorption in what we can learn from them, we move on. We are not petrified at the sight of them. They take on, then, something of the character of other inanimate objects that occupy and decorate the spaces of the living. If we are not offended by their display, it is because we have taught ourselves to think of them as things. The usual process of marking a person’s becoming posthumous attends closely to the fact that the dead change, becoming increasingly repellent. In the West, we accommodate that process either by burying the corpse or by burning it (arguably a highly accelerated Being Non-biodegradable 19 process of decomposition). Both interment and cremation are predicated on managing and then disposing of a body that will rot. Plastination might appear to be a simple advance on those funerary practices, but the endpoint is different. Born and raised outside the United States, I am perplexed by the custom of embalming and cosmetizing the dead and displaying them in elaborate coffins before they are buried or cremated. The practice appears to deny the reality of death but, worse, it seems grotesque both in its effort to conceal the physical effects of being dead and in its inevitable failure fully to achieve this cover-up...