Kristin Scott

Ever since the beginning of time, or the moment in which the bodies of Adam and Eve were exposed to the shame of nakedness, humans have been struggling with issues around the organic body and its products. The organic body is messy, vulnerable, and a constant reminder of our mortality. Inherent within the organic body is death; the human race has felt powerless over the body’s power. Organic bodies are sticky and wet; they bleed, excrete, and produce tears, urine, and spit. Pus, guts, snot, vomit, sweat, and other assortments of wet gooey stuff gushes from the organic body. The organic body is penetrable, whether by another body or a material object; it has orifices, cavities, holes, and fissures in and through which the body can be infiltrated, torn, and ruptured. The organic body is vulnerable to infections, aging, scarring, disfigurement, flawed genetic coding, war, parasites, extreme temperatures, and ultimately, death. The organic body has also been encoded by gender, color, disability, class, history, DNA, geography, and sexuality. Organic bodies are dangerously virulent, capable of infecting other bodies with disease and dis-ease. Indeed, the organic body appears to be a messy, effluvial, and (self)consuming entity; an ultimate harbinger of destruction and death.

No wonder, then, that humans have ceaselessly been in search of the “ideal” body, in search of ways and methods through which to rid the organic body of all that makes it powerlessly organic. The Greeks envisaged their ideal human figure in sculpture: an idyllic structure of proper proportions. Men feared (and in many places, still do) the power of a woman’s body. The legacy of male domination is replete with ignominious and abject representations of the female body. Women could give birth, produce life; thus many feared their ability to also take life away. The woman’s body is more mysterious, its organs of reproduction and sexuality less visible, and thus more powerful in its obscurity. Therefore, the need for domination of the female body became most urgent.

Skin color has also been heavily coded. The white (and whitest) body indicative of a body unsullied, pure, innocent, and incandescent, while the black (and darkest) body is inscribed as soiled, evil, calamitous, infectious, and sullen. The colored body has inherited a history of shame, inferiority, and contempt; it is also an enigmatic body, powerful because perceived sinister, threatening in its darkness. And attempts to dominate, enslave, and render powerless the dark body saturates human history.

Within the Holocaust, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Bangladesh, and Darfur, human modernity culminates in the massive consumption of (sometimes less visible) bodily inscriptions that are so sinister, so contemptible, so feared, that genocide, torture, and persecution are the only means by which the body so inscribed (with such power) can be utterly destroyed.

And yet the organic body contains the power of life. It is vigorous in its consumption of desire, food, drink, and oxygen. And the organic body fiercely resists anything that threatens its survival or its genetic proliferation.

So what do we make of the virtual/digital body? A body that has now saturated the performative theater and is free from the incarceration of gender and race (for we can make the e-body anything we want); a body that has no organs, no mess, and is impenetrable? The virtual/digital body has no fluids, is not vulnerable to disease, cannot be consumed by war, and is free from physical harm. It is a body through which we can play out our most secret fantasies, upon which we can inscribe our deepest desires, with which we can confront our subconscious fears, and in which we can often locate our true identities.

The virtual/digital body is certainly not without history. Indeed, its narrative is deeply rooted within the organic body, established in myth and grounded in Utopian idealism. The image of the virtual body began as soon as we were able to put chisel to marble, paint to canvass, and hands to clay. Contemporary society is saturated with the proliferation of images of the ideal, virtual body via advertisements and the media. Indeed, the virtual body appears to be the final solution to the problem of the organic body. But is it?

Many of us believe we are finally escaping all of the mal associations of the organic body with the advent of the virtual (and technological/cyborg) body. On the contrary, the virtual/digital body serves to continually remind, reinforce and further highlight the limitations of the organic body, because it continually reminds us of what our organic bodies are not. We are both fearful and envious of the virtual body.

The virtual body is the consequence of our dis-eased history, an ideological manifestation that is simultaneously visible and invisible, real and virtual, empowered and disempowered, present and absent. The virtual body acts as a sort of inscribed tabula rasa, appearing, on the surface to be empty and devoid of narrative, though heavily encoded by its mere presence.