Published Fall 2006
 
The Biocultural Turn
(on Marquard Smith and Joanna Morra, The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Future to a Biocultural Present [Cambridge: MIT P, 2006]; Elisabeth A. Lloyd, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005]; and Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005])
For years anthropologists have used something called the biocultural method, a method of studying the interface of culture and biology in evolution. Scholars in a range of fields such as literature, history, economics, and the sciences have now begun to see the value and necessity of the biocultural approach. The biocultural turn departs from the postmodern insistence on the impossibility of certainty and examines the integrity of scientific data, interpretation, and metaphor. Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds, Elisabeth A. Lloyd's The Case of the Female Orgasm, and Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra's edited collection The Prosthetic Impulse all conduct biocultural inquiry.
Donna Haraway's call for the bio-tech politics of the cyborg can be seen as one of several beginnings of the biocultural turn. To the degree that biocultural discourse is a reaction to, and often couched in, the terminology of the cyborg, comparisons are inevitable. In "The Cyborg Manifesto" Haraway argues for a breakdown of the most ingrained and embedded of boundaries, between living and non-living entities, and proposes a "coupling between organism and machine." Although her explicit goal is to envision a union between imagined and material reality, she spends far more time discussing the cyborg's effect on ontology and politics than on the actual material human body—the body of a quadriplegic person, for example, that relies completely on machines. This is the point at which a new dialogue has always been needed.
Where "The Cyborg Manifesto" was a call to intellectual production, The Prosthetic Impulse is a reflection on that production. Morra and Smith observe a reality that is already rife with metaphors of hybridity and call for an exploration of the "inelegant edges" that these metaphors create in our lives. The first half of The Prosthetic Impulse deals with the relationship between language and the corporeal. Vivian Sobchack, in "A Leg to Stand On," observes that prosthesis as language has saturated the reality of lived experience. In her discussion of the athlete/model Aimee Mullins, Sobchack interrogates the ways in which our society has lost track of the materiality behind prosthesis-as-metaphor. Mullins' prosthetic legs are seen as a metaphor of able-bodiedness, as a synecdoche of a runner's cheetah legs, and as a metonymy of a model's Barbie legs. However, while the role of any particular prosthetic limb may clearly be to work with the body in a variety of everyday tasks, the integration of metaphor threatens to make this experience abstract or obscured. The material gets subsumed by the metaphorical. Mullins' acceptance into mainstream culture is at the expense of her claim on experience. It becomes impossible to talk about her identity and experience as anything other than metaphor.
Maintaining the dialectic between the metaphorically and materially prosthetic is, to the authors of The Prosthetic Impulse, not only crucial but the sole way to "make use of [the] possibilities [of the literal and the metaphorical] without becoming unduly sympathetic towards the very thing one admonishes" (Smith 46). Their project is formulated as a conscientious examination of the impact of language on reality. They echo Haraway's call for responsibility in construction of borders but go a step further by actually trying to construct them.
So how are these borders constructed? And what makes them different from the ones that were there before? Marquard Smith, David Serlin, and Alphonso Lingis address the eroticization of prosthesis and its bearing on the mundane life of the body. Lingis's "Physiology of Art," for example, suggests that the human drive towards art is a hidden apotemnophilia (an erotic desire for amputees or for the removal of a healthy body part). He creates a meta-narrative of self-exploration, and by doing so folds his analysis of art-as-sexual-prosthesis in on itself. Furthermore, Lingis challenges readers to identify with the bodies in question, to occupy intellectually and physically the prosthetic skin he speaks of.
The idea of occupying an identity is taken up several times in The Prosthetic Impulse. David Serlin, in "Disability, Masculinity, and the Prosthetics of War, 1945 – 2005," unravels the way that disability has allowed for the performance of homosexuality in the military without risk to the masculinity so crucial to that environment. Serlin finds that prosthesis affirms heterosexuality and vitality at the expense of queer identity. Raiford Guins and Omarya Zaragoza Cruz further investigate the way in which identity is asserted in Afrofuturist texts, and they find an empowering element in the prosthetic arm of the turntable enabling a subversive African American presence in a culture dedicated to its absence.
The metaphorical life of prosthesis is expressed rather urgently in Smith's "The Vulnerable Articulate." In a discussion of Cremaster, a five part performance art film by Matthew Barney, Smith notes the thin line between posthumanism and dehumanization. To Smith, this tendency is further illustrated by the readiness of the public to eroticize prosthesis rather than to accept it as an identity category. Smith points out that Aimee Mullins is more readily seen as a "cyborgian sex-kitten" than an amputee, as a poster child for posthumanism rather than a user of prosthetics. Like Sobchack, Smith attributes to Mullins an inadvertent triumph over the "metaphor of [prosthesis as] lack." At the moments when the invisible seams become visible, Mullins stands instead for the "metonymy of movement" (Smith 67). But is Aimee Mullins' triumph a purely linguistic one? The most misleading aspect of posthumanism, according to Smith, is not the distinction between the disabled body as a metaphor of limited functionality and the body with prosthetics as a metonymy of movement and usefulness, but the interpretation of that boundary. What we have is the razor's edge upon which The Prosthetic Impulse walks: the metaphorical and material power of the prosthetic is always vulnerable to interpretation—to that which seeks to embrace it.
In The Prosthetic Impulse, Lennard J. Davis' "Stumped by Genes" provides a link between discussions of metaphor and of social reality. Davis reminds us that though discrete theories of race have changed, racial identity has been the domain of science since the nineteenth century, and that science contains many ideas that are taken on faith and many more that engage in semantic play. The text that our body writes and that explains it must be like Clifford Geertz's thick description—a text that takes into account "a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures… superimposed upon or knotted into one another…at once strange, irregular and inexplicit" (Geertz 10). Smith and Morra's challenge to the readers, then, is to create a discourse of prosthesis that "exists beyond [the] economy of lack," that is not inscribed always by an eroticization and sexualization of its subject and that can stand self-sufficient and untethered (Smith 68).
Where Haraway proposes to wrest control of a historical narrative, and Smith and Morra suggest a method, Elisabeth A. Lloyd, in The Case of the Female Orgasm, fights for a scientific narrative. The female orgasm (in its presence or absence) is one of the most powerful signifiers in our society. It stands for female autonomy and power, for women's value, and for masculinity (in as much as men are capable of inducing female orgasm). The female orgasm has almost always been contained within science. For example, Freud had two notions of the female orgasm – one clitoral and infantile and the real one that is centered in the reproductive tract. His theories had their roots in the then scientific certainty that in complement to the male reproductive orgasm the female orgasm also promoted reproduction. This led to the assertion that those women who required clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm were dysfunctional (which we now know to be the norm for most women).
Lloyd's hope is to liberate the female orgasm from such biased patriarchal science. She surveys evolutionary accounts of the female orgasm and shows that none of the studies available have adequately proven an evolutionary function for female orgasm either in fertility or reproduction. Furthermore, Lloyd suggests that in each case study the evidential problem stems from biased background assumptions. She supports the nonadaptive account of orgasm as an embryological by-product that explains both "the appearance and persistence of the female orgasm" (163). While Lloyd may seem, to the bioculturally inclined, to give too little time to the social importance of the female orgasm, she successfully proves the reliance of most scientific explanations on biased cultural assumptions, the notion that female orgasm should only be studied in the context of intercourse, the similarity of female and male sexual responses, the uterine upsuck effect that occurs during orgasm, and other popular claims. At the end of Lloyd's work as a scientist is the beginning of biocultural work. Lloyd cautions that unexamined belief in a "neutral set of data is…philosophically naïve" (241). What is at stake in Lloyd's research as well as in biocultural inquiry is not only the scientific method, but the application of its results to the cultural meaning of the human body.
While The Case of the Female Orgasm suggests a biocultural account of material body and metaphor, Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds opens a dialogue about the substance and location of the mind and its metaphors. According to Lev Manovich, among the ways in which the mind is externalized and representation is internalized (film, art, photography), the method most capable of metamorphosing into our cognition is the post-lingual "space shared by everybody," virtual reality. The private process of cognition becomes public, identities become one, and in the "endless interior," the neuro-prosthetic absorbs all traces of the body. Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds explores the economic, social, and cultural implications of multiplayer online role-playing games, or morpegs.
Castronova also interrogates the work that the mind does in creating reality. He asks readers to remember that at the time Neuromancer and Snow Crash were written, William Gibson's and Neal Stephenson's visions of virtual reality were "far in advance of implementation" (Castronova 267). The discrepancy between what was imagined and what we were capable of created a gap in experience, and Castronova examines the initial conditions of synthetic worlds and the point at which the boundaries between synthetic and real worlds become porous. The "complex system [of] human culture" is found on both sides, as are all traces of it—politics, economics, law, markets, and human emotion (267). Castronova pays attention to the representation of the "real" or outside world in the synthetic world, and emphasizes that one of the challenges to creating a realistic synthetic world is making it persistent (predictable), physical (bound by rules), and interactive (within the physical rules one can effect change). But these elements are not what makes the membrane seem porous—the aspects of morpegs that blur the boundaries between worlds are immersion technology, migration technology, and AI. According to Castronova, it is not the representation of the synthetic world that threatens to erase the line between worlds, but the representation of our own thinking processes in the games. The boundaries of the synthetic world have expanded to the point where few players even see them, leaving the distinction in question.
The biocultural turn is most striking because its participants are writing what can best be described as open source code. In the field of software development this paradigm relies on access to the building blocks of ideas, not just conclusions. It allows knowledge to evolve faster and to benefit all, rather than forcing most to work with blinders on while attempting to reproduce someone else's results. The unique aspect of this kind of discourse is that you can change the very foundation of it. Analysis of method and modification of theory is the rule, not the exception. Like open source code, the biocultural trend is toward evolution of inquiry and adaptation of the academic disciplines.
Works Cited
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 2000.
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.
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