Significant Others

Page 5 January–February 2009 from a natural norm, Manson disturbs any established sense of reality—there is no way back to reality from Manson. Manson’s quite explicit references to drug use could have enriched this discussion. In fact, Mechanical Animals also features a track called “I Don’t Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me).” The reversal of subject and object in the title fits well into Toffoletti’s approach, as do many of Manson’s statements about drug use, which indicate a thoughtful awareness of the role of intoxicants and mind-altering substances in history. For Manson (and doubtless for many in his audience), drugs, too, are technologies and prostheses that challenge the vision of a singular, autonomous, humanistic self. Her final analytical chapter focuses on the Australian artist Patricia Piccinini, whose work quite explicitly alludes to Donna J. Haraway. In “Protein Lattice,” Piccinini exhibited a number of photographs of models holding a rodent with what seems to be a human ear. Toffoletti argues that this image of a half-human/half-animal creature underscores the ways in which the ostensibly purely human (but obviously far too perfect) model has also entered a posthuman world. In its broad strokes, Toffoletti’s argument is convincing, but there are some details that weaken her case. Piccinini’s image of the rodent with what one should perhaps call a “humanistic” ear is based on a widely circulated—and, indeed, unforgettable—1997 image of an actual laboratory animal. On her website, Piccinini refers to the animal as a rat, but in fact it was a mouse, called the Vacanti mouse after the scientist who conducted the experiment . Toffoletti also repeatedly refers to the animal as a rat. From a humanistic perspective at least, it is perhaps more significant that both Piccinini and Toffoletti claim that the ear is from a human being. Apparently this is an urban myth—while there was much outrage when the image first appeared because it was widely believed that the ear was human, it was actually created from cow cartilage, with the idea that such artificial ears could be used for humans. Thus, the creature itself did not transgress the human /animal boundary. Of course, the representation does signify a transgression of the human/animal boundary, which is why these factual discrepancies do not seriously hurt Toffoletti’s argument. In fact, the actual details of the story strengthen her argument concerning the human body as a simulacrum. But Toffoletti’s uncritical repetition of Piccinini’s account of the creature left me with the unsettling feeling that I was not getting the whole story from her. In general, I would say that Cyborgs and Baby Dolls does more to explain Baudrillard to a feminist audience and demonstrate how his work can help a feminist agenda than it does to explain feminism to a reader of Baudrillard. But overall it succeeds in its effort to bring the two strains of thought together. Given that Toffoletti likes to cite Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, and Rosi Braidotti, as well as Haraway and Baudrillard, she has a very accessible style. She peppers her prose with personal anecdotes and fairly frequent use of the first-person pronoun, which makes reading Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls like having an exhilarating discussion over several glasses of wine with a brilliant, opinionated, and astonishingly well-read friend who has also managed to keep up with major developments in popular culture. You can’t beat that! Robert Tobin is the Henry J. Leir Chair of Foreign Languages and Cultures at Clark University. The author of Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and theAge of Goethe and Doctor’s Orders: Goethe and Enlightenment Thought, he recently co-edited A Song for Europe: Politics and Popular Music in the Eurovision Song Contest. He has also published on German film, as well as the HBO series “Six Feet Under.” Tobin continued from previous page Significant Others Katherine saunders Nash In When Species Meet, Donna J. Haraway considers an impressive spectrum of inter- and intraspecies relationships among animals and humans, demonstrating the ethical and political consequences of those hybridized unions. Her term for such unions is “figures”: “material-semiotic nodes or knots...