What is a Plastic Body?

[Dave Monroe]

>From Ollivier Dyens, Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of
Man: Technology Takes Over (trans. Evan J. Bibbee and
Ollivier Dyens, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), Ch.
3, "The Rise of Cultural Bodies," pp. 55-90 ...

   "What is a plastic body?  A plastic body is one cut
off from its biology.  It exists, at least in part,
outside the biological realm and depends relatively
little on organic ecosystems for its survival.  A
plastic body is a body-universe, one created from
within its own physiological, psychological, and
genetic systems....  It is a boundless body,
fundamentally cultural, a living form without
biological integrity, unstable and reproducible....
   "The concept of the plastic being has its origin in
The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells.  In this
novella, Wells illustrates how the body, in its
materiality and its essence, can be transformed.  In
fact, Wells's story suggests that bodies have no
absolute integrity, being nothing more than malleable
and flexible material...." (p. 58)

   "On the eve of our contemporary era, H.G. Wells
surmised, as Kafka would, that the body would become
this century's fundamental concern, not only because
its shape was about to be fundamentally challenged,
but also because its specificity (as a receptacle for
life) was being diluted and extended into nonorganic
phenomena....  The twentieth century was, first and
foremost, a body-century, one where living bodies
(human as well as animal) were plasticized, modified,
dismantled, and forced into different cultural molds
and nongenetic frameworks.  The entire twentieth
century treated living bodies like Moreau treated his
animals ... as a flexible material used to disseminate
cultural phenomena (such as ideology, information, and
art).  What's more, over the last hundred years, the
transformed and extended living body has become a new
territory.  The body is not an 'I' anymore; it has
become a vehicle of survival, a vector, a palimpsest,
a hive, a system, and a colony in which the 'I' has
become scattered and diluted.  Like so many during
this last century, Moreau's animals were hunted out of
their own bodies, which had become unstable,
transparent, and multiple, which had become so grossly
transformed as to turn into inorganic forms.  Moreau's
animals were harbingers of concentration camp
prisoners." (pp. 59-60)

Cf. ...

"Remember, Profane, how it is on Route 14, south,
outside Elmira, New York?  You walk on an overpass and
look west and see the sun setting on a junkpile. 
Acres of old cars, piled up ten high in rusting tiers.
 A graveyard for cars.  If I could die, that's what my
graveyard would look like.
   "'I wish you would. Look at you, masquerading like
a human being. You ought to be junked, not burned or
cremated.'
   "Of course.  Like a human being.  Now remember,
right after the Nuremberg war trials?  Remember the
photographs of Auschwitz?  Thousands of Jewish
corpses,
stacked up like those poor car-bodies.  Schlemihl:
It's already started." (V., p. 295)

... as well as SHROUD's line about "What you will
become," Laszlo Jamf's conditioning of the infant
Tyrone Slothrop, Imipolex G, et al. ...

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