http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/zkp/bodycoun.txt

From : Critical Art Ensemble <kurtz+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date : November 1995

Body Count (short non-performative version)

One of the characteristics of ideology is that it universalizes the
particular. That is, the perceptions and desires of a particular
empowered group are re-presented as the perceptions and desires of
everyone within its realm of domination. The historical traces of
nationalized ideology are still functioning, even in the most
technologically sophisticated countries; hence ideology itself is
susceptible to particularisms in spite of dominant global economy.
Consequently, ideological systems manifest themse lves in different
ways, and present to their citizens different forms of spectacle.
However, the element common to all these situations is the
universalization of authoritarianism. My hope is that we can all
come together on this international issue, and through it, find a
common ground for communication. At the same time, I must reassert
that the spectacle that informs my everyday life is not the same
spectacle to be found here. The strategies that I use as an artist
and as an activist to resist ideological imperatives are also
specific and may not be of use in this territory.  For this reaso

even if my rhetoric gets a bit overzealous, I want to emphasize
that I am not speaking for or generalizing about the situation in
Eastern Europe. I am speaking from the particularized position of
an American engage d in the struggle against authoritarianism. What
I do hope will happen in the course of this screening and lecture
is that we can begin to construct a comparative study of resistant
strategies and tactics bound by our solidarity against
totalitarianism, w herever we find it.

The first body type that we would like to discuss is one that
arises out of the apparatus of repression. We know this apparatus
through the institutions of the police, the military, national
guards, and intelligence agencies. The evolution of this apparat us
has been based on the quality of speed. The faster the violence,
the greater its intensity. The quicker force can be deployed, the
more effective it is. The faster a force can move, the larger the
territory it can maintain and manage. Unfortunately, th e organic
body was not designed to be a high-velocity body. It had to be
remade in the mold of the corporate/military blitzkrieg. In the
upcoming video on the repressive apparatus, the first and perhaps
the most profound of the body types appears-the mili tarized body.
This is the first form of the cyborg-a second order cyborg in which
removable technology has been fixed to the human to expand the
possibility for destruction. The armies of the world are filled
with those who want to become killing machines , but another
consequence even more frightening begins to occur. In the age of
the cyborg, the nonrational elements of humanity are factored out
of the equation. War is no longer war, but virtual battle, in which
the combatants see one another only as dig ital abstractions. This
situation has made its way down into the marketplace. For example,
virtual sex, erotica, phone sex, etc. take the place of sexuality
itself. The two most intimate points of human life, aggression and
passion, have been reduced to a utomatic experience.

Show Speed and Violence (tape 1)

****************

I think that it is safe to assume that pancapitalism functions on a
premise of over-production. For profits to increase, production
must rise far beyond necessity. When profits come to a level of
obscene accumulation, they must be burnt off in spectacles of
frantic excess and extreme uselessness. In the US, a prime example
of burning off profits in useless constructions is the American
Intercontinental Missile system. The function of this system is to
never be used. If it becomes useful, it has failed, or so the plan
of "mutually assured destruction" tells us. To make sure it remains
useless, it is constantly upgraded and perfectly maintained-no
expense is spared. Since the fall of the Soviet empire, there is
really no place to even aim the missiles, and hence the system has
transcended itself and evolved into an even higher realm of
uselessness. Frantic excess is the burning off of profits in war.
Nothing will stimulate an economy like a good killing spree-hence
the US aggression against such military gi ants as Haiti, Grenada
and Panama. For these activities of destruction, the killing
machines are needed; however, to build the profits necessary to
carry out such sacrifice, a different machine is needed-the
consuming machine. To create such a machine, an body image is
needed that does not really exist in the realm of the organic-a
vision that cannot be physically replicated, no matter how much
labor power is expended, no matter how much profit is spent. In the
US, the body without organs (referred to hereafter as the BwO) has
been created. This is a body that only exists in the moment of
telepresence; a body that is only a surface mediated by the screen.
The BwO thrives on a peculiar structuring of contradictory
motivations. On one hand, the similarity of the morphology of the
BwO to our own produces sympathy within us and a desire to be like
it. On the other hand, the BwO produces intense jealous y within
us. We cannot be like it, nor can we escape the predicament of
mortality that the BwO has escaped. Jealousy and sympathy entwine
to produce that perfect feeling of deprivation-the feeling that we
must have something we don't really need. The stro nger these
feelings, the more willing one is to be programmed as an extreme
consumer. We are also warned by the BwO that if we do not reduce
ourselves to the surface of consumption, that the mortality of the
organic will come oozing forth. The anti-BwO is always represented
in horror films and in comedies of humiliation for this very
reason.

Show BwO ************************

The reactions to the BwO tend to vary. One of the more paradoxical
is the buffed  or hard body. It is difficult to be sure whether
these gymnasium devotees are attempting to reestablish the primacy
of the organic body, or if they have only found their nic he in the
matrix of consumption. Nor can one be sure whether they are organic
parodies of a first order cyborg, or if they truly believe that the
organic body can be made to do what a body of mechanical and
electronic extension is capable of doing. This group has refused
the desire for disembodiedment. While pleasure may not be their
first concern, they are sensualists. They like to feel the body. To
feel it hurt. To feel it strengthen. To feel it heal. There is a
peculiar return to essentia lism in their demand for the primacy of
the body. The body is more than just a social text; it is also the
locus for reality.

Show Philosophy in the Nautilus Room (tape 3)

*******************

For every cult willing to embrace the primacy of the body and other
organic essentialisms, there are those who revel in the recombinant
qualities of the body as social text. The body can be inscribed
with ever shifting sign systems continuously transformi ng the
presentation of identity and role with every new situation. The
question is, where do these social texts come from? Are they
predetermined for the consumer or are they the affirmation of
individual desire? Paradoxically both possibilities seem true . The
desire to reassign one's gender is certainly categorized as deviant
by the defenders of the status quo. Nothing jumbles bureaucratic
records more than such fundamental shifts in being. Gender, of all
things, should be stable from the bureaucratic pe rspective. In
light of this situation, gender bending seems to have liberatory
consequences. One divorces oneself from one's files, and follows
one's own desire. On the other hand, if the body is a transforming
entity, and gender is an ascribed textuality , a gender sign must
precede the expectation of the individual for it to be understood
as a signifier of gender. Consequently, the individual is only
changing from one predetermined text to another. Is there really a
difference between Coke and Pepsi? Is the choice between these two
options really a choice at all? Does selecting Pepsi over Coke
really represent indi vidual choice? In the following video, CAE
presents the queen of anti-essentialism, transsexual Toni Denise.
On one hand, she is radicalized, in the sense that she refused to
let biology be her destiny. On the other hand, her goals in life
are to be the girl nex t door-to perfectly blend with the consumer
excess of suburbia-and to be the perfect desire machine for men.
Certainly her conception of being a woman is rather reductive, and
skewed toward the masculine. What is being colonized and what is
being liberate d in this situation? Toni is a first order
cyborg-her situation cannot be reversed. She has surgically stopped
the sign flow. In contrast to her are those who bend gender through
performance. By modifying expression, costume, and gesture, they
become what they wish to be. The recombinant pattern flows ever
onward. The following is a modest foretaste of the virtual body
that is to come.

Show Gender Crash (tape 4)

**********************

The virtual body is a matter of speculation. Certainly it is the
body with which we have the least experience. There seems to be two
varieties, one which is clearly repressive and the other which
tends toward liberation. The first, we know as the data bod y.
Unlike the more liberatory virtual body, the data body is in no way
limited by the corporate promises and futurologists predictions.
The data body is here and now, complete and functioning. It is
alive in cyberspace. The data body is the collection of digital
files that validates the social existence of an individual. This
body explains to others in officialdom who we are.  The social
being of an individual is determined by these files, and the
individual is helpless to contradict this body of informat ion.
Further, individuals cannot control their own data body: They do
not know where it travels, nor  to whom it speaks. Tragically, it
speaks louder than its organic counterpart. To control the data
body is to control the person, and this is one key to t he power of
the elite of the virtual class.

Show Data Body   (tape 5) *****************************


But there is another virtual body out in the electronic ether.
Hopefully one that we can control. On this body we can reinscribe
our flesh with whatever coding system we desire. We can try on new
body configurations. We can experiment with immortality by going
places and doing things that would be impossible in the physical
world. For this virtual body, nothing is fixed and everything is
possible. Indeed, this is the reason we hear of hackers wishing to
become a disembodied consciousness flowing freely th rough
cyberspace, willing the idea of their own body and environment.
This potential utopia is a place where equations of freedom can be
tested, but as yet it is still only a testing ground. After all, we
must always reembody, and let's face it, VR has no t evolved much
beyond basic GUI systems that are based on the overly simplistic
formula of stimulus, response, reward or punishment. VR is still
very far from a multi-sensual reality replication. The experiment
that we consider in the following video is what would happen if the
tongue located itself in different areas of the body. What would
speech, taste, and oral sexuality become if the tongue could
nomadically wander about the body, tak ing up residence where it
saw fit? What would the language of the toes, the breasts, or the
anus be if the tongue stopped at these locations and began to
speak? In the realm of the virtual body we can begin to investigate
these matters, or at least waste some time on speculative folly.

Show Tongue Spasms  (Tape 6) ************************** Fin

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