Getting Under the Skin, or, How Faces Have Become Obsolete

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. ¹

Over the last two decades, the discourse around and about the body, as represented in popular science, in the arts (especially performance art), ² in theory and cultural studies, and even in the realm of advertisement and fashion (e.g., the new cosmetic lines of high-fashion designers such as Helmut Lang), has gotten more and more "under the skin." The importance of outer appearances to the representation of the body has receded as the inner body has come to be discovered, to be relevant, and ever more present. Organs, tissue, cells, and blood—once the denizens of a terra incognita of highly specialized medical knowledge—have in recent times come into circulation as markers of individual and group identity. Moreover, since the 1990s the inner body has been recorded and "eternalized" through new technologies—such as the Visible Human Project, the Human Genome Project, and the Anatomy Art of Gunther Von Hagens—that have indeed changed knowledge of and approaches toward the human body.

One of the important moves in this process of "getting under the skin" has been the fragmentation of the body: the presentation of a body in pieces. This process, however, is not new, but has been going on since early modernity (i.e., the sixteenth century)—in other words, since the emergence of the new insights and technologies concerned with viewing the body anatomically. In this essay, I show how the discourse of a body in pieces has recently been overcome; or better, how the fragmented body has become obsolete. Beyond even Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's call for bodies without organs, the body at the turn of the millennium has turned into an "organ without a body"—or better, into an "organ instead of a body." In this synechdotal move the first, and probably most important, body part that had to be overcome was the face. The face, which has always overcoded other body parts, has now ceased to be the most representative signifier of human appearance: "under the skin," every organ has an (inter)face; potentially, every organ may stand in for the whole body.

In recent examples of popular culture, from high fashion to cinema to even cosmetics advertisement, we can trace a movement that leaves behind the fragmentized body, that moves beyond the notion of a body in pieces. In this "posthuman" body, ³ every part—interior and exterior—is autonomous, separate from the body in its entirety. It is therefore no longer a "body in pieces," but a "defaced" body: one that has lost the quality of faciality, and hence, of overcoding, or standing in for the whole. The fragmented body was already eulogized by what Deleuze and Guattari called a "body without organ(ization)s," a plane of consistencies, a surface of inscription, in which any body part pushes toward the surface, and becomes able to "overcode" the rest of the body. ⁴ But in the current discourse universe, even the body itself would no longer seem necessary; rather, what must be recognized is the insistence on "organs instead of bodies (OiB)"—namely, organs that are configured as "inside out," having lost their quality of being "in" the body. What counts foremost in our current analysis is that this OiB is a "flattened" body ⁵ that has attained the value of a screen, a surface of reflection—in other words, a medium in itself: the medium has taken the place of the body.

The Body in Pieces

The parts of the corpus do not combine into a whole, are not means to it or ends of it. Each part can suddenly take over the whole, can spread out...