Wendy Wahl

Department of English
University of Vermont
w_wahl@uvmvax.bitnet

 

High technology networks make possible the deluge of texts surrounding us. We swim in the flow of information, and are provided with (or drowned within) interpretations and representations. High technology has changed the way capital functions, and makes possible the electronic format of this journal. A new relationship between bodies and technologies is, seemingly, unprecedented in modern capitalism. Donna Haraway, in her “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985), writes of a post-natural present in which “Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are frighteningly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert” (152).

 

After all, the human capacity to generate or make sense of information has been surpassed by computers, and challenged by the deluge of texts (literal, aural, visual) that surround us. Baudrillard’s response to this deluge is triggered by a quick spin of the radio dial: “I no longer succeed in knowing what I want, the space is so saturated, the pressure so great from all who want to make themselves heard” (132).

 

Theorists from many disciplines are engaged in the process of articulating the function and effects of high technology; many have argued, as Baudrillard has, that the human condition has been transformed by the encounter with the unique and unprecedented power of high technology. Assuming a material uniqueness in the encounter with high technology is dangerous; this assumption obviates important precedents that may help us to strategize some resistance to a “gradual and willing accommodation of the machine” (Gibson, 203). Freud’s clinical methods, and his construction of the relationship between patient and therapist, for example, are strikingly similar to the current encounter between bodies and technologies. A look at Freud’s account of his treatment of Dora makes obvious this decidedly low-tech version of a “deluge of texts,” and shows the way in which this therapeutic construct incorporated resistance. What are the possibilities for resistance to this new deluge? This question has provided the impetus for a vital, and absolutely necessary, discussion of strategies. As I will show in this essay, these responses are symptomatic of the failure of resistance to technologies of the early twentieth century. Strategies of resistance are often incorporated into systems, strengthening that which is being resisted. Juliet Mitchell has described the function of this resisting space: “[Resistance] is set up precisely as its own ludic space, its own area of imaginary alternative, but not as a symbolic alternative. It is not that the carnival cannot be disruptive of the law, but it disrupts only within terms of that law” (Mitchell, 1982).

 

I hope to provide some strategies, and historical warnings, that may help one actualize and resist power at a time when the possibility of doing so seems dismal. Haraway reminds us, with hope and pragmatism, that “we are not dealing with technological determinism, but with a historical system depending upon structured relations among people” (165). This “historical system” includes the interaction between bodies and technologies and the implications of these encounters, which are referred to in this essay as “cyborg politics.” The origin of cyborg politics doesn’t begin with the late twentieth century, however, but with the broad tradition of positing scientific and technical solutions to free humans from pain and to solve problems of the human condition, particularly problems that originate not with the machine or technology, but within the body. Foucault has given us a description of the emergence of bio-technical power in the seventeenth century; his description of this power maps onto our twentieth- century concern with bodies and technologies:

 

Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a "physics" or an "anatomy" of power, a technology.(206)

 

Within an early twentieth-century Foucaultian formation, Freud emerges as the mental technologist and industrialist, producing the truth of mind and body within the critical tools of psychotherapy. Freud constructed a method whereby the mind, largely abandoned to the world of religious therapies, was treated by empiricists, and built upon the work of the psychiatrists of the French school: Charcot, Georget, and Pinel (Goldstein, 134-166).

 

Psychotherapy was a new disciplinary technology, unique unto science because it treated the mind as a machine (a method previously visited upon the body). Freud ushered in the Western twentieth century with this industrialist approach to the soul, fracturing the inner self in two: “conscious” and “unconscious” drives. Within this new science, and in Freud’s clinical approach, the Cartesian dualism of mind/body breaks down: “mind” has been divided into conscious/unconscious. As a result, “mind” is no longer one unitary term that can correspond to its binary opposite, “body.” This disruption could be promising: mind/body corresponded to male/female, and it would seem that this pair of binary oppositions would no longer be able to function with respect to gender. Yet this deconstruction of oppositional pairs serves to strengthen others, and raises some thorny questions for Freud’s treatment of Dora.

 

What, then, becomes of the relationship between mind and body within the Freudian construct? If there is a disruption of the mind/body dualism when the “mind” has been fractured into two distinct entities, how does this affect clinical practice? Freud changed these pairs or, at the least, expanded the way they function: the patient’s experiences, as described by the patient, were informed by the unconscious mind in a way that was not evident to the patient. In deconstructing the mind/body separation, Freud constructed a new oppositional pair in its place, that of the conscious/unconscious. The relations between the conscious mind and body were obvious to the patient, but those were less important for fixing the machine than was the relationship between the unconscious mind and body. If this relationship was the arbiter of the body’s functions and of the conscious mind, how could one go about fixing it? One couldn’t; a therapist had to be called in for repair. The “unconscious” drives were given over to the interpretation of the therapist. In treating the machinery of the mind, Freudian therapists were given the interpretive duty of constructing desire and representing the inner self. Philip Reiff, in his introduction to Dora, captures the perfect circularity of Freudian psychotherapy as enacted in clinical practice:

 

By presuming the patient incapable of an impartial judgment, the therapist is empowered to disregard the patient's denials.... A patient says: "You may think I meant to say something insulting but I've no such intention. . . . From this the analyst may conclude, "So, she does mean to say something insulting...."(15)

 

It is also evident in Reiff’s description that resistance against a therapist is incorporated, and neutralized, within therapy. The Freudian therapeutic situation is a cybernetic network in which resistance functions to support the system. It is in this clinical practice that any potential disruption of dualisms promised in Freudian theory were recuperated. That Freud has constructed an impenetrable defense for the therapist is obvious. In retrospect, it’s easy (albeit reductive) to view Freud’s incorporation of resistance into therapies (as a prerequisite for therapy) as a frustrated empiricist’s attempt to fit the mind into the structure of empiricism.

 

The patient/therapist opposition was constructed in place of the mind/body opposition, and re-enacted as male/female. Perhaps Freud’s construction of an impenetrable position for therapists, and an utterly penetrated position for patients, created a backlash against the material moment when male/female became disengaged from mind/body. At any rate, the context is utterly changed for a patient of psychotherapy. The beginnings of an answer to the question of gender difference in the therapist/patient relationship lie in asking the following question: Who is treated and why? Men were rarely caught on the “penetrated” side of the therapist/patient relationship. Although male/female no longer enacted mind/body, another structure excluded men from needing this interpretive therapy: the impetus for treatment is resistance on the part of the patient. Philip Reiff characterized the category of patient in his introduction to Dora when he wrote that, “the neurotic makes too many rejections” (16).

 

Although men were no longer excluded from the category of patient, having unconscious drives themselves, the prerequisite for treatment was often hysteria or neurosis. Hysteria was a term used to categorize actions seen, historically, as being particular to women, although Freud and the Paris school’s characterization of hysteria did not expressly exclude men. Jan Goldstein has documented that hysteria was flirted with by most of the nineteenth-century French male novelists, and she argues that the literary interest in such a disease “included as one of its components a fascination with this ‘otherness,’ a tendency to recognize in it aspects of the self and to enlist it in the service of self-discovery” (138). Goldstein’s theory would also explain why Flaubert never entered into therapy, despite identifying himself as an hysteric. In his fiction, Flaubert wrote of hysteria only through female characters, as did all the other French novelists mentioned in Goldstein’s essay.

 

Dora’s treatment, after all, was not in the interest of self-discovery, but in the interest of her father. Dora had been brought to Freud in an effort to get Dora to accept her father’s affair with Frau K. The father also needed Dora to respond to Herr K so that he could get his game of partner-swapping to continue to go smoothly: he attempts to swap “partners” with Herr K by offering his daughter, Dora, to Herr K, in exchange for Herr K’s wife. This play of substitutions, begun by the father, certainly asks to be seen as a machine. This is a desiring machine in which substitutions can be made: there are slots to be filled (so to speak) that eclipse an individual desire to be in that position. This is particularly true in Dora’s case. When Dora was put into treatment, Freud writes that “[s]he objected to being pulled into the game entirely, at the same time she was fascinated by it and wanted to play” (34). By the time treatment had begun, Dora was suicidal, and had been resisting Herr K.’s advances, the first of which occurred when she was 14 years old. “He suddenly clasped the girl to him and pressed a kiss upon her lips. This was surely just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen who had never before been approached. But Dora had at that moment a violent feeling of disgust and tore herself free from the man . . .” (43).

 

Freud writes that “the behavior of this child of fourteen was already entirely and completely hysterical” because she did not have the “genital sensation which would have certainly been felt by a healthy girl in such circumstances” (44). Dora’s resistance to Herr K.’s advances provided Freud with the cornerstone of the psychology of the neuroses: reversal of affect. Without Dora’s bodily resistance to Herr K., Freud would never have been able to treat her in the first place. Without Dora’s repeated verbal resistance to Freud’s suppositions, he couldn’t have written in the “repressed” desires for nearly everyone in the “game.”

 

Interestingly enough, in his interpretation of Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Freud didn’t perceive any indications that this approach could inhibit treatment by negating the patient’s interpretations. Freud’s textual analysis of the Memoirs, titled “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)”, ignores the obvious: Schreber is able to treat himself via his own process of writing and interpretation.

 

Schreber writes of his “gratitude” toward Professor Fleschig, his doctor, for helping Scheber to recover, but in a manner “so hedged with doubts and reservations that it subverts the expressed appreciation” (Chabot, 16). Schreber doesn’t give credit for his recovery to the doctor who was in charge of his treatment, and blames this on the doctor’s inability to recognize his patient as “a human being of high intellect, of uncommon keenness of understanding and acute powers of observation” Memoirs, 62). What does this tell us about Freud’s understanding of Schreber’s treatment? Freud didn’t extrapolate Schreber’s therapeutic process to his own clinical method; he ignores that Schreber’s experience points to the healing power of a patient’s interpretation. The patient’s story, moreover, must not be systematically negated, as in the treatment of Dora.

 

C. Barry Chabot examines these texts in his book Freud on Schreber, and writes that “Schreber’s understanding of his experiences . . . evolved with his progress on the manuscript: the act of writing was for him an act of revision”; “[m]oreover, writing his memoirs, an act that . . . played a role in [Schreber’s] eventual release from Sonnenstein, was itself restorative” (7). Schreber produced texts, as Freud did. Schreber’s ability to heal himself is evinced in the act of writing his Memoirs: Schreber’s “revision” and interpretation of his own experience is the therapeutic process by which he heals himself. Chabot makes a compelling case for the clinical and literary interpretations as being intertwined, such is “the nature of the interpretive process, be it literary or clinical” (11).

 

It can be argued that Dora does produce her own narrative, but this is used by and subsumed within Freud’s interpretation in clinical practice and, more permanently, within Freud’s written texts. Schreber’s interpretation existed outside of the formal or institutional therapy he received. Freud’s textual analysis of Schreber’s memoirs was just that: a textual exploration outside of clinical contact with the patient; as such, Freud’s analysis never affected Schreber. In Freudian clinical practice, the interpretive process that Schreber used to successfully treat himself would have been used against him by the therapist. Reiff writes that Freud “speaks of using facts against the patient and reports, with some show of triumph (this is no mean adversary), how he overwhelmed Dora with interpretations, pounding away at her argument, until Dora…’disputed the facts no longer.’ Yet these facts were none of them visible; they were all of them of the highest order, taking their life from the precise truth of Freud’s multiple analytic thrusts into her unconscious” (16).

 

The act of interpretation was the province of the therapist alone, and was used to engulf the patient with “indisputable facts.” These critics continue to argue for a material uniqueness in the encounter with high technology, yet the “invisible facts” referred to by Reiff could easily characterize Baudrillard’s vision of the late twentieth century: “In any case, we will have to suffer this new state of things, this forced extension of all interiority, this forced injection of all exteriority that the categorical imperative of communication literally signifies” (132). This “forced injection” into Baudrillard’s as-yet- unpenetrated interior mimics Freud’s act of “pounding away” at Dora with his interpretations. Baudrillard’s profile of the new subject, assaulted on all sides by “those who want to make themselves heard” doubles for the Freudian patient: “He is now a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence” (133). What Baudrillard can’t accept, obviously, are the multiple “thrusts” into his neutral terminal. Using theory to play with the loss of his private past and with the disruption of his position as subject, Baudrillard recalls Flaubert’s flirtation with hysteria.

 

Fredric Jameson’s response to the problem of subjectivity also evokes the nineteenth-century French novelists; he writes that “only by means of a violent formal and narrative dislocation could a narrative apparatus come into being capable of restoring life and feeling to this only intermittently functioning organ which is our capacity to organize and live time historically” (523). In arguing for some sort of analytical prowess of which we are not capable at the moment, Jameson is putting the hope for a solution in a neo-Freudian construct: if we could only think ourselves away from the matrix, it would no longer penetrate us. This may be possible for Jameson or Baudrillard, but what about Haraway or myself? I mistrust that totalizing logic which would also exclude me; as a woman, I am linked by the system of significations to that repressed “other” against which this new “narrative dislocation” is posed. Baudrillard’s nostalgia for a private past, and Jameson’s characterization of the current condition as a sickness (needing analytic therapy), exclude the object, locating interiority once again within their experience.

 

The pentrator/penetrated relationship is gender-neutral in Freudian theory but enacted as male/female in clinical praxis; will Baudrillard’s theoretical loss of subjectivity be recuperated in the practice of technology? The reaction to no longer being excluded from the category of patient or hysteric in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century parallels the reaction of men in this late twentieth century who are no longer excluded from the category of “penetrated.” This reaction is utterly significant: in a backlash against inclusion (signaled by the paranoid reactions of Flaubert, Jameson, and Baudrillard), the function of Freudian therapy Dora) and technologies of the bodies Neuromancer) is to keep gender opposition active. It’s a fascinating pattern: Baudrillard’s paranoid reaction to being a receiving terminal, penetrated continually by the hegemony, should be a warning for cyborgs seeking to strategize resistance to high technology. Even more symptomatically, Paul Virilio has declared: “We must take hold of the enigma of technology and lay her on the table” Pure War).

 

It’s dangerous to argue for a material uniqueness in the function of the panopticon, precisely because it prevents us from recognizing this continuing pattern of discipline and resistance, especially the way in which certain types of resistance are codifed to support the disciplinary society. Is there any space in a postnatural future for a female subject with interiority? Is it possible for a reading to occur which locates women in the position of subject? Although the human capacity to generate or make sense of facts and information has already been surpassed by computers, resistance to the matrix may work for Baudrillard. In William Gibson’s cyberpunk manifesto, Neuromancer, the (bachelor) machine incorporates high technology differently than the body does. The technologies of which Baudrillard speaks have been seamlessly incorporated to liberate men from their bodies and, as such, the mind/body paradigm is reclaimed as male/female with chilling results. That Neuromancer was intended as an historicized future is evident in Gibson’s description of the novel: What’s most important to me is that it’s about the present. It’s not really about an imagined future. It’s a way of trying to come to terms with the awe and terror inspired in me by the world in which we live” (Rosenthal, 85).

 

Gibson’s work, based as it is on the present encounter with bodies and technologies, should inform any speculation or theoretical vision of our future. Pam Rosenthal describes Molly and Case, the heroes of the novel, as part of “an elite cult” who feel “an existential righteousness about diving into the matrix, braving its dangers, getting as close as possible to the shape of algorithms that come about as close to truth as anything does in the bad new future” (90). The access to information, and the surveillance tactics used to gather it, rests with multinational corporations (zaibatsus) in Neuromancer. Elite status is signaled by access to information in the hierarchy of the matrix in Neuromancer: getting in to the cyberspace of invisible facts equals power, and “not to be able to jack in [to the matrix] is impotence” (Rosenthal, 85,102). Molly’s experience of the matrix is fundamentally different from Case’s; the difference is informed by constructions of gender, although their resistance to the matrix (and zaibatsus) makes both of them more malleable and exploitable by the companies that control the matrix.

 

Neither Case nor Molly want the life of the “little people,” or, as Case puts it “company job, company hymn, company funeral” (37). Case makes his living as an information cowboy, able to jack in to the matrix, to fix his addiction to cyberspace/access/information. In this way, the mind/body separation is encoded via technologies of the body, and it’s furthered by the structure of the novel: whenever Case jacks in to the matrix, Gibson begins a new paragraph, highlighting the separation between the body and the mind/matrix. Case doesn’t seem to have a body unless he is inside Molly, either in sex or in sim/stim. In the first case, Case’s visual description recalls images of the matrix and, in the second, he perceives Molly’s bodily sensations electronically. Molly is the body. Case can jack out at any time.

 

Molly gets into cyberspace, too, but only so that her body can be programmed during “puppet time.” Freud’s dictum that “there is no ‘No’ in the unconscious” is literally true for Molly in this situation. She paid for the reconstructive surgeries by working as a “meat puppet,” a high-tech form of prostitution in which a receptor chip is implanted in a woman’s brain. The chip provides reception for the “house software,” chosen by the customer. So what happens when Molly is with a customer? Her cyberspace is blank and her access to the matrix doesn’t disconnect her body from other bodies (witness Case). The programs used on Molly were progressively violent after the house found out she was using the money she made to become a ninja, to construct a body capable of being a killing machine. The function of the software to direct Molly’s actions mimics, terrifyingly, Freud’s version of the unconscious:

 

You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? . . . once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that's it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren't in, when it's all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for . . . . [t]hen it started getting strange . . . . The house found out what I was doing with the money. I had the blades in, but the fine neuromotor work would take another three trips. No way I was ready to give up puppet time . . . so the bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software cooked up. I wasn't conscious. It's like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain....you can see yourself orgasm, it's like a little nova right out on the rim of space.(148-9)

 

When Molly comes up out of puppet time, her reaction to the scene for which she had been programmed is violent opposition. Although her ability to react to the scene is an accident of faulty wiring, it’s a direct refutation of the programming, the unconscious, and the technical separation of mind and body:

 

I came up. I was into this routine with a customer. Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We were both covered with blood. We weren't alone. She was all. Dead. So I guess I gave the Senator what he wanted...the house put a contract on me and I had to hide for a little while.(148-149)

 

Freud could have learned a few lessons from Molly about whether the conscious mind can say “No” to the unconscious drives. It is, however, an after-the-fact refusal; when Molly is unconscious (to a degree Freud could never have imagined), she seems totally incapable of resisting; it is the dysfunction of high technology that allows Molly’s “No.” The circle has been completed with techobodies, however: the access to the mind via science is complete, the comfortable line between human and machine has been erased, and the human therapist is no longer needed to interpret the signals. It’s a direct line.

 

The Freudian therapeutic paradigm can be mapped onto our relationship with (and struggle over) technologies of the body. The array of technologies used to construct bodies in Neuromancer seem fantastical, even technically impossible, yet the rush to develop technologies with which we can construct our bodies will provide funding and justification for their development, regardless of the health risks involved. At a recent Senate hearing over the safety of silicon breast implants (which have been known to break down once inside the body and produce disabling disease of the immune system), it was presumed that, despite these proven health risks, implants should be available for “cosmetic” uses. However, after testimony from “scores of women” who testified to their need “because of what they said they believed were their own deformities,” many panel members said they were “convinced that no line could be drawn and no group of women could be defined for exclusion” (Hilts). The cultural question of why “some women [are] terrified of not having the option to reconstruct their breasts” was never raised.

 

The solution to the problem posed presented to the F.D.A.? Surveillance. It was agreed that every woman who had undergone or wished to have this operation be “kept track of” in a database, set up by the companies which manufacture the implants. One can’t help but wonder if these records, and the access to them, might be used later to deprive the women of the protection allegedly promised to them–perhaps in manufacturing a “safe” reading of the implants or, alternatively, to prevent these women from taking action (legal or otherwise) against the companies.

 

The FDA case is simply one example of the need for some sort of resistance to this future. The case has some disturbing implications for Rosenthal’s declaration that “the matrix is too complex and fragmented to offer itself to any one unifying gaze–a notion that does not seem entirely reassuring to me” (95). This sentiment is problematic when we look back at Dora, whose unifying gaze had the opposite effect. Reiff acknowledges that Freud “had to admire Dora’s insight into this intricate and sad affair…Yet he fought back with his own intricate insights into the tangle of her motives…. Freud was to call this tenacious and most promising of all forms of resistance ‘intellectual opposition'” (17). Compare this statement with the following description: “Knowledge . . . is utterly immanent and implicated in the forms and technologies of instrumental power, and readable only to the extent that we have the power to decode it. How we are known and what we know constitute a matrix of unjustly distributed power . . .” (99).

 

This is Rosenthal, reading the matrix, yet it’s an uncanny characterization of the power dynamic that exists between Dora and Freud. But what about the present? In the wake of a reevaluation and, oftentimes, refutation of Freudian theory, wasn’t Freud’s clinical method also revised? Not completely; this clinical process is still used to manufacture belief and consent. In the latest issue of Mother Jones magazine (January/February 1993), Ethan Watters reports on psychotherapists who help their patients recover memories of physical and sexual abuse. The search for these memories, in theory, seems auspicious at a time when there is growing evidence that “childhood abuse is widespread” and underreported. Working against Freud’s seduction theory, based on the assumption that patients’ memories of abuse were fantasy (29), some therapists have taken the opposite tack, bringing past abuse to light by examining their patients’ subconscious memories. In theory, this hopeful disruption of Freud’s seduction theory promises to validate and treat the pain of childhood abuse.

 

This theoretical promise can be destroyed within a clinical method that recalls Freud’s relationship with Dora. Using hypnosis, suggestion, trance writing, and dream analysis, therapists “search [the patient’s] subconscious” for signs of abuse (26). Watters found that many of these memories were false, but are made real for the patient. The case of Kathy Gondolf reveals the process by which her beliefs were used against her to construct the version of her past held by the therapist. When Gondolf sought help for chronic bulimia, she told her therapist that she had been abused by an uncle during childhood. Watters reports that “[l]ater, during individual and group therapy, [the therapist] used dream analysis and trance writing to search her unconscious for signs that other members of the family had abused her as well” (26). Gondolf’s account of this therapy is a poignant reminder of the power dynamic in the relationship between therapist and patient:

 

You're sitting there and someone has taken everything you thought you know about your family--the people you love--and twisted it. They tell you that everything you knew for twenty, thirty, forty years was wrong.... It was devastating for me. Everything is so simple in the world of repressed memories, . . . if you claim that your parents cared for you, then they [psychotherapists] say that you are in denial. Anything you say can be misinterpreted. There is no way around it. This is costing people their lives.(26)

 

The women in her therapy group all claimed to have repressed memories of abuse as children, and one woman killed herself after “discovering” these memories. Gondolf, like Molly in Neuromancer, was released from this regimen when the supporting apparatus malfunctioned: her insurance ran out. Gondolf began to “examine repressed memories on her own” and, like Schreber, found treatment in being her own interpreter. She “became convinced” that “her therapist had coerced her and the other members of her group into imagining memories of abuse” (26). Forced out of the system, Gondolf relied on her own conscious memories to construct the truth of her history.

 

Is it possible to be “forced out” of the relationship between bodies and technologies? We cannot choose to end this relationship, as Dora chose to end her relationship with Freud. Nor can we escape the deluge of electronic texts. If any resistance to the “gradual accommodation of the machine” is possible, it will depend upon our reaction to the machine, and a continual realization that the machine is a human creation, a social creation. In late twentieth-century capitalism, has anything else assumed the role of therapist for us? In the struggle over representation, the media is given the power of interpretation; just as anything that is “conscious” knowledge (articulated by the patient) could not, by definition, belong to the “unconscious,” we are re-enacting the role of interpreter of reality with media. In doing so, we lend strength to the role of media by centering resistance within that arena.

 

In resisting hegemony via the struggle for representation, we may re-enact the binary opposition of representer/represented (and, on the same axis, therapist/patient); this resistance focuses on and strengthens the textual/media arena in which our actions are interpreted and represented. The exclusivity and limitations of television have been disrupted in the strategies of ACT-UP. The organization has found a way to use televised media without having financial access to them (staging protests during broadcasts as audience members, for instance).

 

We need to reconsider the issues of media(s) and representations with respect to the ways we define ourselves. Technology, having been taken into the body and reproduced (the male gaze being but one example), poses some immediate challenges. Neuromancer is the circle completed: technologies of the body connect the flesh to the computer. The issues raised here with respect to the post-natural future, and the questions of resistance, are urgent. Remembering the patterns of discipline and resistance, and the space to which the other has been assigned, might be a first step in helping us to describe and resist the “slow apocalypse” of technology (Rosenthal, 96).

 

It’s not simply that the body must claim its resistance against the machine; when recuperation is instantaneous one can resist only though finding new ways of resistance that don’t operate through negation, or marginalization. Resistance that succeeds is a testament to the interpretive power of individuals to make sense of their lives. I hope to have presented some warnings and historical precedents that may help one actualize and resist power in a time when our ability to do so is matched against and challenged by our encounter with technology.

 

Note

 

1. I have chosen to cite from The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (Pantheon Books: New York, 1984), because selections from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [translated by Alan Sheridan, Panthon Books (Random House) 1977] are brilliantly excerpted in the section titled “Discipline and Sciences of the Individual” (pp. 169-239). The excerpts describe many of the terms and issues used in my paper, particularly the formulation of the term “discipline” and the uses of “the examination” to further surveillance and power.

Works Cited

 

• Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press, 1983.
• Chabot, Barry C. Freud on Schreber: Psychoanalytic Theory and The Critical Act. Amherst: U Mass Press, 1982.
• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books (Random House), 1977.
• Freud, Sigmund. Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Introduction by Philip Reiff. Collier Books, New York: <1963.
• —. “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides).” The Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. Volume XII:9. London: Hogarth, 1958-1974.
• Gibson, William, Neuromancer. Ace: New York: 1984.
• Goldstein, Jan. “The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and Literary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century France.” Representations, v. 34 (Spring 1991): 134-166.
• Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge, 1991.
• Hilts, Philip, “F.D.A. Panel Cites Need to Keep Breast Implants.” The New York Times, November 15th, 1991, p. A8.
• Jameson, Fredric. “Nostalgia for the Present.” The South Atlantic Quarterly v. 88, no. 2 (1989): 521-32.
• Mitchell, Juliet. Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing, and Women. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.
• —. “Femininity, Narrative, and Psychoanalysis.” Women, The Longest Revolution. Virago Press, Ltd., 1982.
• Rabinow, Paul, Ed. The Foucault Reader. Pantheon Books: New York, 1984.
• Rosenthal, Pam. “Jacked In: Fordism, Cyberspace, and Cyberpunk.” Socialist Review (Spring 1991): 87-103.
• Schreber, Daniel Paul. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter. London: Dawson, 1955.