Incorporations

From the Buddhists’ earth-tethered sac of pullulating orifices to cyberpunk’s utopian virtuality, the human body is a cultural text. The bent-legged gait of cultures that still know how to squat, the breathing taught to meditators, the rhythms of welders on the assembly line, the fixed stare of the soldier, the way girls throw—all are what Marcel Mauss years ago called “body techniques” (455)—ways of being in the body that become “natural,” but are contingent, malleable, and (at least initially) unfixed. The processes of in-corporating these techniques may be experienced as punishing the body; viz. Foucault’s description: “they . . . mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.” ¹ Such processes may just as well be seen as therapeutic or liberatory, such as the physical therapist’s massaging of traumatized limbs. But the modern body is one that current scholarship more often portrays as Taylorized, mechanized, regimented, controlled, patrolled, and never more unfree. Is this chambered view of history the “corporate” bottom line? Is regimentation the necessary cost of modernization, or was there ever an option, an option postmodernism might now pursue?

Upon lifting the 600-plus pages of Zone Books’ latest installment in a series of provocative tomes on the body, one has reason to hope for answers. Incorporations is edited by Jonathan Crary, a Columbia University art historian whose 1990 Techniques of the Observer continues to provoke debate about its nineteenth-century subject, and Sanford Kwinter, a Paris- and Columbia-educated scholar of comparative literature who teaches architecture at Rice University. The editors have culled influential texts from the past and joined them with musings from a wide range of contemporary scholars, linking a set of largely francophone “fathers” (Georges Canguilhem, François Dagognet, Didier Deleule, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Marcel Mauss, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilbert Simondon) with artists, dancers, architects, writers, and academics whose disciplines range from sociology to history of science to English to film theory—forty-four contributions by forty-nine individuals.

Crary and Kwinter want to distinguish their topic from “what contemporary habit too knowingly calls ‘the body,’” (13) emphasizing that it is the more fluid, labile, and hard-to-pinpoint structure of life that interests them and the authors they have assembled. “Life” serves them as a more capacious concept than the body (which is nonetheless everywhere in this volume), because its presence as immaterial energy (as well as organic structure) can become manifest in technological as well as organic systems. The somewhat veiled historical argument being made at this juncture—between a modernism still being theorized and a postmodernism not yet fully understood—“is how the classical processes of the mechanization of life are giving way to a new and unprecedented vitalization of the machine” (14). In this revisitation of the technological sublime, the old toggle switch is broken: humans will neither be the masters of their machines, nor tools of them. They will be partners in a new “biotechnics”—supple new clothing for our old machine dreams.

This is a sophisticated collection of some of the best contemporary authors around, all of them trying to think fast and hard about what the barrage of micro- and macrotechnologies will do to us before it becomes a fait accompli. Writers in the first part of the volume view particular historical trajectories, from early twentieth-century kinaesthetics (in an impressive fifty-page exploration by Hillel Schwartz) to contemporary genetic engineering (in a three-page warning from Donna Haraway) to a century-long evolution of nonlenticular optics (Lisa Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb); they celebrate historical bodies’ liberation from mechanistic movement (Schwartz), caution against the commercial concerns that would patent the chemical substrates of life (Haraway), or look forward to the dismantling of panoptical “vision-based knowledge” (Cartwright and Goldfarb [201]). Other essays demand that we view life (and the technologies modelled on it) in surprising new ways that invert or subvert those bio-technological relations. Manuel DeLanda...