Commentary

David Porush
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

 

David Porush responds to Allison Fraiberg’s essay, “Of AIDS, Cyborgs, and Other Indiscretions,” Postmodern Culturev.1 n.3 (May, 1991):

 

Allison Fraiberg uses the discourses of AIDS to read large oppositions and tendencies at work in our culture. As such, AIDS is one more battlefield between right thinking and wrong thinking. Here wrong thinking is promoted by a reactionary, self-serving, moralizing majority that prescribes a cure for AIDS in “traditional” values to the exclusion of others an that denies the extent to which all our bloods and responsibilities commingle in the vast, luscious, and newly-dangerous circuitry of sexuality. The Bad Guys in her reading of her culture are clearly defined: they are listed and quoted at the beginning of her essay and resurface in various guises–people who promote the nuclear family, white middle class males, ad propagandists who ironically forget how to use sex to sell the public on the use of condoms.

 

At times, Fraiberg manages to free herself from her orgy of jargon and deconstructionist agitprop to achieve real eloquence, especially when she calls for a redefinition of sexuality–also the most fun parts of the essay. Almost all of the conclusions which she reaches in her argument are both inarguable and quite tame: we must all engage in safe sex, but do so with the awareness that sex puts us in the circuit, that we take responsibilities for our own bodies, that AIDS should not be a tool for scapegoating and de- humanizing groups of people. Rather, AIDS ought to impel us to redefine the body, the self, and our sexuality (along with our discourses sexuality) as participants in a looping feedback with the interpenetrating systems of otherness which really create our culture (or really culture our creativity).

 

The essay, however, has a tendency to discard or demolish practices and ideals that would satisfy even a new cyborg mentality simply because they have been tainted by association with conventional, conservative ideology. In this, there is a confusion or conflation between reactionary rhetoric (out of homophobia and racism, the moral majority use their prescriptions to define the other as alien, diseased) and technically safe practices (monogamy, safe sex, abstinence from IV drug use, the nuclear family)–in short, discretionary activities. The clearest example comes when Fraiberg writes,

 

[16] . . . monogamy means little if one partner is HIV+ and the couple, thinking they have fulfilled the moral requirement in the symbolic contract that disqualifies them from contraction, practices unsafe sex.

 

While we would not argue with the premise (that there’s something nasty about the prescription of exclusive monogamy for everyone in the culture) nor with the amusing analysis elsewhere in this essay (that the more you ask folks to say no to their pleasure they more likely they are to embrace it impulsively), we might argue with the conclusion. After all, monogamy means quite a lot, especially if one partner has AIDS. It promotes responsibility to and awareness of everyone else in the circuit, and indeed fulfills Fraiberg’s own call to greater cyborg awareness.

 

The second problem here actually arises from the essay’s greatest strength: Fraiberg’s excellent application of deconstruction methods to the term “discrete” and “discretion.” The effect of her analysis is to construct a marvelous pun (there is high magic to low puns): she converts the word discrete from its first meaning (distinct, separate, severed, discontinuous) into its other meaning, as in discreet (exercising judgment, discernment, etc.). To enhance the beauty of this play, and in typically deconstructive fashion, phrases like to exercise discretion Fraiberg notes, ought to mean the opposite of the first kind of discrete: the “discreet” individual now knows that AIDS uncovers the very extent to which we are not discrete but are participants in the circuit. All well and good so far.

 

The problem is that Fraiberg herself has trouble explaining exactly what all this means and resolving the contradictions to which it leads:

 

[21] The traditional, tenuous limits of the body dissolved into fused networks, into open circuits of interconnectedness, produce an ontological recognition that, from this perspective, urges the body into discretion. Closed off, guarded against infection, beware the surface; any exchange of fluid, that is, any disclosure of an open, leaking body threatens. A closed, self-contained body resurfaces from the within the integrated network.

 

[22] But this is a different kind of discretion. It's not the kind of discretion clung to by those who deny any fusion; it's a kind of discretion, discreteness, that is a consequence of the recognition of indiscretion. So while the cyborg ontology takes as its premise the dissolution of traditional boundaries associated with the body, its referent in the texts of AIDS, epistemologically speaking, forces the body to resist coming to rest with those integrated circuits and, instead, reorganizes into discrete units. In this sense, discretion returns, not in the form of reactionary denial, but as conditioned by a cyborg-like system. In other words, if the cyborg ontology can be said to function as the discursive field upon which networks of social relations play themselves out, then that field must by willing to admit--indeed, it has already admitted--the constructions of what might seem quite odd to cyborg theorists: writings and readings of the body grounded in discretion.

 

What happened to all that fun stuff about broadening and redefining the sexual act itself?

 

I think these two problems are actually produced by a deeper flaw in Fraiberg’s argument, one that rests with her reification of the Bad Guys, her tendency to see them as blind and inexperienced at best, sheerly vicious at worst. She wouldn’t need to twist and contort her prose into these unnatural postures if only she would grant that perhaps AIDS brings us all–not just the privileged few who have been immersed in the discourses of a salvational cyborg ideology –to pretty much the same level of self-awareness about our position in the intertwined cyborg loops of culture- sexuality-identity. We are all equally “conditioned by cyborg-like systematicity” and we are all made more aware of our sexuality by AIDS. The proof is in the result: most of us, William F. Buckley included, have come to the same conclusion–that survival entails reorganization “into discrete units.” The only difference is that Fraiberg claims a greater degree of awareness and calls her interpretation a “progressive reconstruction” while denying a level of agency to (and blaming for a certain intentional viciousness) the poor dumb self-righteous suckers who stick to monogamous heterosexuality and keep their spouses and kids and stupidly try to prescribe it for others, not only because it works for them but because they may not have a taste for the impedimenta of dental dams and condoms, not to mention anal penetration and fellatio and IV-drugs.

 

Perhaps the proper conclusion is that all the rhetorics about AIDS are dispensable. We can certainly do without the oppressive totalizing rhetoric of the official versions of AIDS, with its self-righteousness and its encouragements of hatred and fear and otherness. But maybe we could just as soon dispense with arguments that use AIDS to take what is in the end an obscure high moral ground through the sterile and overly-self-conscious rhetoric of the encrusted academic. In this case, such a rhetoric strives to reconcile the “good” ideology of openness, liberation, and tolerance (as well as rejection of all simple and patent and conventional formulations, like “safe sex” and “monogamy”) with two incompatible notions: the allure of the cyborg and the realities of AIDS. In the end, two into one won’t go and the rhetoric of liberation finds itself sadly overmatched. This is one menage a trois which is simply an unproductive configuration. Cyborgization probably produces just as many new reactionaries roaming the golf courses in their abstinence as it does enlightened networkers, the new cyberpunker proles who roam the loop looking for action. And AIDS, as this essay manifestly demonstrates, produces caution and discretion and a discipline of the self, a redefinition of the body not simply as a sensorial machine, but as an invitation to disease, no matter what rhetoric you process it through. Postmodern liberation, with its yearning for whatever it postmodernism yearns for, must await some different kind of apocalypse to scratch that epistemological/ontological itch.

 

I know this is an anathematic suggestion to most postmodernists, who hold, as I did for a long time, to a more or less constructivist position: there is no reality that isn’t reconfigured or constructed by discourse. In its most radical tenet, we convince ourselves that it’s all discourse, there is no reality at all, so you’d better be careful which discourse you choose. But if you look at the facts of AIDS, it really does scare you out of the constructivist position. There’s something awfully touchable and factitious about it, especially if you watch it close, destroying a friend. There’s even something haunting and scary, to which any AIDS researcher will attest, about the HIV virus itself. Let’s take paragraph to explore it:

 

Normally, a cell begins with DNA, which is transcribed into RNA, which then codes for proteins, the building blocks of cells. But AIDS is the ultimate cybernetic disease; it inverts and subverts the normal DNA-RNA-DNA loop (thus the “retro” in “retrovirus”) by imposing its own loop. Where most viruses are DNA, HIV is an RNA virus. With the insidious collaboration of reverse transcriptase, it takes over and alters the DNA transcription process, forcing it to produce more retroviral RNA, which in turn takes over the DNA in other cells. At the same time, it changes other parts of DNA, encoding for proteins that alter the body’s cells, actually making them more receptive to further HIV infection. Finally, the RNA replication cycle is activated by anything that turns on the immune system: in other words, the immune system defeats itself every time it tries to work. Spooky and evil disease. Nasty shit.

 

     I suggest we all take a closer look at the possibility –made even more ironic by the tendency of some to laud the coming cyborgization of our bodies and minds–that AIDS is just the first of a terrible series of cyborg events against which simple enlightened discretion is not proof. Perhaps retroviruses themselves are the product of orgiastic physiological feedback mechanisms between the world and the world-body, which might continue to spawn these transcription reversals between RNA and DNA because we have achieved some new order of Prigoginesque complexity.1 AIDS really does make cyborgs of its victims, and by extension, of us all, as the glomming of a cybernetic system onto an organismic host. If this is what cyborgization portends, I’m gonna resist.

 

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Notes

 

1. In Order Out Of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984), Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers discuss the consequences of Prigogine’s Nobel-Prize-winning work on chaos. They explain how new biological organisms of increasing complexity arise naturally and inevitably from conditions of turbulent chaos: the HIV viral family may be an example of just such an occurrence.

 

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Allison Fraiberg

University of Washington
<fraiberg@milton.u.washington.edu>

 

Allison Fraiberg replies to David Porush:

 

In reading David Porush’s comments, I realized that parts of my essay were not as clear as I would have liked them to be. Based on Porush’s comments, I would like to take this opportunity to reiterate some points that I think are crucial to my argument as a whole. Consequently, I will reply to Porush by focusing on areas where I sensed the most confusion.

 

What concerns me the most are quibbles about, or blatant dismissals of, two crucial starting points in my essay. The first involves a conclusion of Porush’s that retroactively revises one of my premises. Porush writes that “[p]erhaps the proper conclusion is that all the rhetorics about AIDS are dispensable” (8). Easy to say, but not so easy–or even desirable–to do. Douglas Crimp opens the collection of essays in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/ Cultural Activism with an important reminder. I quote him at length since he reaches the heart of the matter:

 

AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it. We know AIDS only in and through those practices. This assertion does not contest the existence of viruses, antibodies, infections, or transmission routes. Least of all does it contest the reality of illness, suffering, and death. What it does contest is the notion that there is an underlying reality of AIDS, upon which are constructed the representations, or the culture, or the politics of AIDS. If we recognize that AIDS exists only in and through these constructions, then hopefully we can also recognize the imperative to know them, analyze them, and wrest control of them. (3)

 

To dispense with the rhetorics of AIDS, in Crimp’s frame, becomes an impossible task since AIDS exists “in and through” them. Crimp’s point is that you can’t distinguish AIDS from the practices which make it intelligible. Choosing to ignore the discourses of AIDS is something I can’t even picture: every day I see stories on television, in the newspapers; I hear of new public policy and legislation; I see people die. I don’t see how one can dispose of the rhetorics–it’s not a Lego set that one can put away when one has tired of playing. I can, however, see how some people have tried to revise/alter/speak different rhetorics in attempts to “recognize the imperative to know them, analyze them, and wrest control of them.” And, in seeing and experiencing various actions and discourses put into motion by AIDS strategists, I have realized that “encrusted” academics have no property rights on discourse.

 

The second premise around which Porush and I disagree centers on a temporal sense of positioning. Porush writes of the “coming cyborgization of our bodies” and how he’s “gonna resist” it. I’m somewhat taken aback by the future tense here since my whole argument rests on the assumption that Haraway’s cyborg myth is not going to happen but that it has happened (“The cyborg is our ontology”). The first half of my essay uses a cyborg ontology as its premise: Haraway for the description, then my resituating of discourses using Haraway’s frame. By using the cyborg as a starting point, I’m saying that–and this is by no means an astounding observation–rhetorics of humanism and organicism have produced, are currently producing, and, dare I say, will probably always produce, radical material inequities for the vast majority of people.

 

So, if a) the cyborg is our ontology and b) discourses that deny the cyborg are at best archaic and at worst deadly, do you continue to tell the story of organics–a story that doesn’t quite fit the picture? Do you speak of the futility of trying to do anything in this configuration (Haraway: “Paranoia bores me.”)? Do you speak in the rhetoric of the future–and thereby deny various realities? I choose none of these since I see in them no opportunities for change. Instead, I’ll take on Haraway’s challenge of “being in the belly of a monster and looking for another story to tell” (“Cyborgs at Large” 14). Consequently, what I did was take a description of current relations and resituated AIDS discourses on it.

 

And what I saw from the belly of the monster was how certain discourses had tried so hard to resist being digested by the monster; I also saw others that knew that’s where they were. The alternate AIDS strategists knew that they were in the belly of a monster and while I was there I saw something exciting happen: the alternate AIDS discourses began to revise the belly. These discourses, the discourses that recognize a cyborg-netic body, began to revise postmodern versions of the blurry boundaries of the body. They resurfaced the body and by so doing created a post- circuited discrete unit.

 

Porush says in his response that I pun on “discrete” and “discreet”: I do, but he misses my final step. I move from the discrete bodies of liberal humanism (separate, distinct) to the pun on discreet (the various definitions on all sides of what constitutes a certain sense of judgment). But then I move on to discrete again. I move on because it’s not a revised sense of judgment that propels the argument; it’s a revised discrete sense of the body. In other words, I go from “discrete,” to “discreet,” to “discrete.” And by the time I get around to the second version of discrete, it looks very different from the first one that set the pun in motion. That alternate AIDS discourses and strategies revise versions of the body offered by mainstream media, humanism, and postmodernism seems to me a powerful and energetic practice.

 

It’s a powerful practice that begins to tell another story–another story that tries to describe what’s happening to people–and I read the story as being about agency. So my essay isn’t about safe sex or new forms of judgments: people with a lot more visibility than I’ve got have been saying these things for 10 years with little luck (but, based on what I read in a recent poll I took on the electronic bulletin board used in composition courses at the University of Washington, it wouldn’t hurt to have those ideas reiterated, again and again and again). Instead, I’m interested in how agency is conditioned and produced in the move from “discrete” (version 1) to “discrete” (version 2).

 

In this second version, you can’t arrive at an agent without looking at what Porush rightfully calls the “realities of AIDS.” Agency is the result of the resurfacing of the–differently discrete–body; and the agency arises out of the material conditions that force the resurfacing. When Porush quotes me saying we are all conditioned by cyborg-like systematicity, he adds a word that completely alters my intention and, consequently, my argument: he adds “equally” before conditioned, a move that once again forecloses on this version of agency. I would never say that we are all equally conditioned by anything. I would never say, for instance, that the women on factory lines in Southeast Asia who assemble my computer and I, who use this computer to write, are “equally” conditioned by the transnational circuit of which we are both part; I would never say that gay men and straight white women in this country are “equally” conditioned by the cyborg-like systematicity I describe in my essay.

 

In fact, it is the redistribution of agency that grounds my argument (I must apologize to Mr. Porush if he doesn’t find this as much “fun” as he would like). The type of material agency I propose is one that shifts attention and authority away from hegemonic biomedical and governmental institutions and onto those most affected. It also forces theorists, postmodern and otherwise, to take our cues from where the materialist agent stands: usually downtown organizing street actions, protests, and die-ins.