Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 3 Number 2, August 2002
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Dyens,
Ollivier. Metal and Flesh. The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over. English
Translation from French by Ollivier Dyens and Evan J. Bibbee. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001. 120 pp. ISBN 0-262-04200-2
Reviewed by
Imagine a world where global culture is defined by the number of links to a Website, where biology is the least fashionable science and where Pamela Anderson is not so much the ample doyenne of Baywatch as an “ideological virus”. With its undulating poetic clauses and boldly-go depictions of our brave new reality, Ollivier Dyens’ book Metal and Flesh reads like a futuristic science-fiction epic in the tradition of Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn and Orwell’s 1984.
Nevertheless, this arresting book is about the present, riddled with empirical evidence about the today’s world. In his examination of the relationship between the human body and technoculture, the Canadian writer examines how the entanglement of technology and biology throughout the twentieth century has created a new set of rules for existence. “We are not less human, but differently human,” he asserts.
Eschewing the conservative notion of life as a purely organic phenomenon, Dyens argues convincingly for a world of life-forms made up as much of oxygen and hydrogen as of digital images and bits of metal. The bleeding of the natural with the artificial over the last one hundred years has given rise to a new kind of body, one that relies only partially on biological processes: “the cultural body”.
From prosthetic limbs and collagen implants to the dissemination of a film star’s image and voice through digital media, life, as Dyens defines it, continues irrespective of the organic limitations of a “source” body or “original” event. These days, it seems biology has precious little to do with life. In fact, the definition of life itself is open to debate. “Organic beings are only one possibility of life,” says Dyens. “The living is a dynamic flow of information, and this flow also exists in the non-organic realm.”
In Dyens’ biosphere, viruses hold their own and the woman who calls herself Pamela Anderson is a corpse in comparison to the celluloid icon whose image can be seen on thousands of locker-room walls and websites. “The real Pamela Anderson is much less “real” than her cultural double,” writes Dyens.
Steeped in the cyberpunk canon (Neuromancer, Robocop etc) and the evolutionary theories of such writers as Kevin Kelly and Richard Dawkins, Dyens’ book becomes, as a by-product, a concise and well-rounded survey of twentieth century technocentric thought. Dyens diligent readings of Kafka, H G Wells and Orwell, and his constant return to the twentieth century preoccupations of fragmentation, liquidity and the collapse of hierarchies, makes Metal and Flesh read at times like a postmodernist text-book.
In fact, Dyens’ strongly-argued thesis about the evolution of the cultural body is so firmly grounded in postmodernist ideology, that it feels as if his ideas were removed from a postmodernist context, they would have no grounds for existence. Perhaps if Dyens had chosen to look beyond the last century for inspiration, he could have found compelling examples of the techno-corporeal relationship that would have given his arguments greater dimensionality.
After all, the twentieth century was not the only “body century” – from the use of lead compounds in makeup in Elizabethan times to the engineering of torture contraptions throughout the ages, humans were “cultural bodies” by Dyens’ definition, long before the Industrial Revolution arrived.
Dyens trumpets the evolution of a new body, a vessel though which information passes seamlessly between different optimally-designed nodes. His ideas speak of fresh possibilities and infinite potential. The thesis is far from negative, yet the hold of gloomy postmodernist texts and theories over Metal and Flesh makes it seem so – the examples and case studies Dyens draws upon to shed light on his thesis are almost entirely pessimistic.
Dyens’ literary references from the dark worlds of In The Penal Colony and Bladerunner, are not alleviated by his examples of “hybrid bodies” from contemporary life. The “genetically modified pigs,” “headless tadpoles” and “silicon implant superstars” bring to mind the disastrously dislocated world of Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke. With this freak-show roster of distorted and dysfunctional beings, ultimately, it’s very hard to imagine, having read Dyens’ book, how the merging of metal and flesh can do humankind any good.