What
first drew me to the imaginings of bodies within the realm of digital medias
and novel technologies was a scene from Charlie Chaplin’s silent comedy film Modern Times (1936).  In this scene, Chaplin, a lowly factory
worker, is chosen by his high-ranking superiors to be the subject of an
experimental trial of a newly engineered “eating machine.” The prototype is
described by, its creators, as a cost-efficient alternative to lunch breaks,
allowing the factory’s workers to be productive while they eat. Once Chaplin is
holstered safely in the machine’s compartment, the trial begins. The machine
begins rotating its functions, at first feeding Chaplin soup, then rotating to
what looks like small chunks of meat. The interesting part of this scene begins
when Chaplin is met with a corn-on-the-cob dispenser, as it were, that loses
control and spins at an un-bitable cadence. The film intercuts between the
machine’s malfunction — humorous for Chaplin’s reactions to the ensuing chaos —
and the worried creators who want nothing more than to sell their product.
After toying and re-wiring the mechanism, sparks fly out of the equivalent of a
main processor, a feat that implies that machine will no longer be accessible
or reparable. Here, Chaplin is subjected to a ridiculously fast rotation of the
machine, getting food tossed everywhere — most of the time hitting him directly
in the face. The scene meets its end when the creators turn worriedly to the factory’s
owner/operator and plea for his consideration of a repeated experiment to which
the owner grudgingly shakes his head. The next shot, a title card, reads: “It’s
no good — it isn’t practical.”

This
essay examines the relationship between man and machine through the underlying
thematic opposition between organic and inorganic functions. Much like the
scene above from Modern Times, I
mention specific films and texts and describe them through the theoretical
discourse of Chun, Benjamin, and Marvin. The body, as presented throughout
these works, occupies a predominant place in its interactions with new
technologies. Moreover, the viewer is engaged in the work through the visceral
connection/accessibility of the image of the body amidst an array of wires and
artificially intelligent systems.

Returning
to Chaplin’s film, the notion of malfunction becomes very interesting. The film
presents a direct interaction between man and machine, and from that
interaction one can draw many conclusions. The first comes from the inset
opposition or otherness of man to machine and vice versa. In her essay, The Enduring Ephemeral, or the
Future Is a Memory, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun questions the essence of New Media and
traces it across different media platforms and theoretical texts. In a section
of her essay that contemplates the contradistinctions between humans and
machines, she contends: “Also key to the newness of the
digital is a conflation of memory and storage that both underlies and
undermines digital media’s archival promise. Memory, with its constant
degeneration, does not equal storage; although artificial memory has
historically combined the transitory with the permanent, the passing with the
stable, digital media complicates this relationship by making the permanent
into an enduring ephemeral, creating unforeseen degenerative links between
humans and machines” (148). Here, the relationship between memory and storage
is complicated by the degenerative capacities of new media. In other words, new
technologies, like the human processes of memory, can malfunction and, thus,
complicate the contrast between the capabilities of humans and machines.

This phenomenon is exemplified in Modern Times and points to a situation
where human deficiencies are to be replaced by artificial superiority. Of
course, in Chun’s thinking, due to the degenerative capacities of new media,
the machine cannot replace human idiosyncrasies or, more precisely, eliminate
human failures or shortcomings altogether. The ephemeral place of new media is,
in this sense, manifested through Chaplin’s interaction with the machine and
the fact that it malfunctioned. The implications of this scene come to light
when one considers the nature of the rejection of machines by humans. The
factory owner saying, “It isn’t practical,” accentuates the failure of the
machine to replace or supplant human deficiencies but also points to the nature
of the machine’s existence. It seems that the reason for the trial itself was
to make the workers more practical, either for an unsatisfactory yield or
simply to push profits. The presence of the machine is one of replacement, of
substitution, but as Chun’s discourse and the film itself demonstrates, one
cannot join the organic with the inorganic. When the natural and artificial are
joined, there are immediately visible benefits — the initial ease of the dinner
rotation circuit and delivery of food — but eventually both forces reject each
other.

The second and final conclusion drawn from the sequence is
contextualized in another of Chun’s notions: “This always-thereness of new
media is also what links it to the future as future simple, as what will be, as
predictable progress. By saving the past, it was supposed to make knowing the
future easier. More damningly, it was to put into place the future simple through
the threat of constant exposure” (154). Modern
Times, as a whole, is constantly surrounded by futuristic themes. Even the
factory wherein Chaplin is administered the test is futuristic, and boasts the
technology promised by the oncoming years. The introduction of the machine
represents the presence of the future within the present. Chaplin’s role as the
subject of the experiment pairs past, present, and future within one sequence,
and when the machine malfunctions the temporal implications of the machine are
problematized. Here, as in Chun’s thinking, the machine presents the future as
it will be, and its malfunctioning functions as a vessel through which Chaplin
can translate his opinion on the future. The film characterizes the anxiety
felt towards the present through its satirizing of the industrial and
technological rush of the 30’s to move forward and constantly be on the cutting
edge. This distinctly American preoccupation subverts the immediacy of the
present for the idealized visioning of the future. The machine comes to
represent this preoccupation and its malfunction, thus, pokes fun at the
elaborate and extravagant visioning of the future. Here, the implications of
this sequence range from historical, to cultural, societal, technological, and
economic concerns.

            Modern Times foregrounds the
degenerative and untrustworthy nature of the artificial, in relation to the
human, through its satirizing of a futuristic machine. This satirizing works to
elucidate the contrast between the inorganic and organic and also demonstrate
the inability for one to replace the other. The degenerative and erasable
nature of both memory and storage allow for the cultural, historical, economic
and societal implications of the film to be discerned and analyzed.

            William
Gibson’s novel, Neuromancer, provides
another, even more direct means of engaging with the body amidst technology.
Following Case through his hacking adventures in a dystopian visioning of a
cyber-space future, the novel uses vibrant descriptions of the body’s response
to technology to engage and captivate the reader. The strange and, at times,
unbelievably extensive capabilities of technology are tranalated and
familiarized through their interaction with Case’s and other character’s
bodies. Before delving into a more specific example, I turn to Carolyn Marvin’s
essay "Locating the Body in Electrical Space and Electrical Time" in When
Old Technologies Were New, wherein she contends:

 

The body is the most familiar of all
communicative modes, as well as the sensible center of human experience, which
lives or dies with it. Upon it, all other codes are inscribed to a greater or
lesser extent. There is no form of language that does not require the body’s
engagement…In addition, strange experiences are often translated and made
familiar by comparisons with the body, and by categories of classification
derived from the body’s experience. The body is a convenient touchstone by
which to gauge, explore, and interpret the unfamiliar, an essential
information-gathering probe we never quite give up, no matter how sophisticated
the supplemental modes available to us. (109)

 

Here, the translation of obscure and imagined information is
made possible through the familiar and accessible sensations of the body.
Gibson uses this capacity to describe Chase’s role as a hacker and bring to
life his experiences within the realm of cyberspace. However, the novel’s most
interesting character, in my opinion, is Armitage a.k.a Colonel Willis Corto.
Perhaps the most mysterious character throughout the read, Armitage is to Neuromancer what Colonel Kurtz was to Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now. Armitage,
we find out, was a war veteran who survived a mass killing of his troop and was
the only survivor. Upon returning, his weak and post-traumatically effected
consciousness was replaced by the AI Wintermute with the Armitage personality.
Thus, Corto remains inert beneath the artificial personality that supplanted
his own and towards the end the inorganic and organic parts of him rejct each
other. During the final and most deliberate mission of the text, wherein Case
and Molly must merge Wintermute and Meuromancer, Corto’s personality returns
and tears through the artificial façade that Wintermute bestowed him with. Much
like Kurtz and his place as the AWOL colonel, Corto’s past returns to burden
him. This entire phenomenon demonstrates the historical, personal, and
technological implications of the joining of man and machine, or artificial
consciousness. In the context of Marvin’s excerpt, all of this transformation
is made palpable of Gibson’s descriptions and his relation of Corto’s
experience through corporeal and bodily delineations. To better grasp this
notion, I refrence a passge from Neuromancer,
when Corto breaks from Armitage:

 

But it wasn't a craziness he
understood. Not like Armitage's madness, which he now imagined he could
understand; twist a man far enough, then twist him as far back, in the opposite
direction, reverse and twist again. The man broke. Like breaking a length of
wire. And history had done that for Colonel Corto. History had already done the
really messy work, when Wintermute found him, sifting him out of all of the
war's ripe detritus, gliding into the man's flat gray field of consciousness
like a water spider crossing the face of some stagnant pool, the first messages
blinking across the face of a child's micro in a darkened room in a French
asylum.  (17.12)

 

Here, Gibson’s prose elucidates the tangibility of his
descriptions and give life to Corto’s situation and experience. The reader is
immediately immersed through the familiarity of the bodily sensations Corto
experience; the translation comes as a result of the descriptive language. The
rejection of organic from inorganic is also exemplified in this excerpt. Their
coalescence is of a fleeting nature, as displayed through the analysis of Modern Times above, and is further
elucidated here. Again, the body becomes a vessel through which the
reader/viewer can experience the future. He/she can actively escape the past
and present to the idealized visioning of what’s to come and grab hold of the
characters and their experiences.

            Another of
Marvin’s delineations work to illuminate the contrast I describe above, and
helps conclude the analysis of the body rejection of the inorganic: “The body
is also squarely at the critical juncture between nature and culture. It is nature, or in any case man’s most
direct link to nature, capable of opposing and resisting it at least for a
while, either its own or that external to it. The inscription of cultural codes
upon the body is perhaps the principle means of detaching it from nature and
turning it into culture” (110). It’s at this very juncture that both Chaplin
and Gibson frame the interactions of humans with machine and the chaos that
ensues.

            Among other
idealizations of the future, still in the vein of Neuromancer, I find myself fascinated by the paintings of Irving Norman. Defined by some as fitting within the genre of Social Surrelaism, his
paintings portray the body within the anxiety and congestion of imaginings of
the future. One not only sees the painting, one experiences it for its unique
and detailed representation of the body in the spatial and temporal context of
the future. His paintings capture the anxiety, claustrophobia of Gibson’s
dystopian setting and the mesh of organic and inorganic that fuels the novel.
Norman’s paintings show man subverted to nature, the condition that eventually
broke Corto.

            In
conclusion, throughout both these works the body is represented within the
realm of new media and is, thusly, compared to it. The combination of the
natural with the artificial, the organic with inorganic, is one that becomes
impossible over time. One always rejects the other. Here, the analysis deals
with the nature and reasons for this rejection as well as the representation of
it by filmmakers and authors alike. I am mot deeply affected by Marvin’s
contention of the body’s capacity to translate and communicate across any
medium or within any imagining and I evidence that ithi my analysis. The body’s
place amongst technology is one that has, and will always be, unnatural.

           

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