Abstract
The first chapter is devoted to the discovery of the body, the construction of knowledge about the body and the aspiration to interfere with its “natural” processes. Along with this investigation, the crucial epistemological issues are being discussed. The presentations or representations of the body, the processes of gaining knowledge about it and of gaining power over it are comprehended as interrelated. Anatomical drawings of the human body were relevant for the conceptual organization of this subject (human body in general) and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Vesalius 1543), which is considered the first scientific anatomy book, served the medical practice. Anatomy pierced into the body to see through the opaqueness of tissues and visual representations were based on the same logic of revealing what is hidden to the naked eye. In Renaissance the regime of media transparency became commonly accepted. The walls opened with painted “windows” through which the eye could see various environments. The method supported planning, the drawing became a sketch for the future building, visualizations were involved in the practice of engineering. In this chapter visual media that represent human body are questioned as means for discovering or “insight” into the truth and discussed as related with the tendency to gain power over the body. There are three moments of visualization that are closely examined in the first subchapter—the principle of mimesis, the technique of perspective and map making. In the second subchapter the tendency to pierce deeper in the body is analyzed from aesthetic and epistemological aspects. With the birth of the clinic anatomy has started to serve medicine and the gaze of the nineteenth-century anatomist became focal. The focus of the third subchapter is this moment, in which knowledge quite directly came in service of intervention. Yet, there was a delay of intervention into the body because dead bodies were observed in the nineteenth century. This fact prevented timely healing of the ill bodies. Technical imaging on the contrary enables observation of a living ill body. Enormous development of imagery technologies throughout the twentieth century therefore crucially strengthened the power over the body. In the fourth subchapter gaining power over body is discussed in reference to biotechnology. The issue of godlike creating, which is discussed in the first subchapter as regards the principle of mimesis, is here re-examined in the case of synthetic biology. Two terms are central to the discussion: perspicere and proicere. To be able to comprehend or gain insight (perspicere), we project. We project what is then to be acknowledged. What then does the quest for the truth mean in this regard? What is this conquest all about? These questions become seemingly even more actual with the intervention of biotechnology because now we manipulate matter according to our own program, we are engineering and designing. In other words, we are creating a world in which we want to live. At the same time, we strive to explore the universe in order to be able to migrate to other planets. Today, the body has become subjected to the technology of power—i.e. biopower—to such a degree that the power over life itself has been exercised not only over the population in general, but also on the fleshy, micro, nano, chemical and visual scale of a singular body. Biotechnology does indeed give humankind a power over life that was not attainable before, though the intervention of biotechnology belongs to a quest that did not first begin in the biotech century. Moreover, it is a part of a quest that has not yet been completed. But this power is not omnipotent. We are able to intervene in certain ways, but this does not mean that we can intervene in every possible way, nor are we able to create a human being from scratch. Is there a grand narrative here about the attainment of a totalitarian power over life that one can detect in the aspiration to this ultimate goal to “create” life from scratch and which is in turn detectable in the “development” of knowledge about life and the technology designed to manipulate it?
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- 1.
Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), p. 16.
- 2.
Vilém Flusser, “On Discovery,” in: Artforum, New York, Vol. 27, No. 10 (Summer 1988), p. 17.
- 3.
In this study Jay emphasizes that we should recognize the plurality of scopic regimes and detects two others, one that refers to Dutch seventeenth-century art and could be called the art of describing (after Svetlana Alpers), and another which could be best identified with the baroque for its rather passionate approach and its dazzling and disorienting ecstatic surplus of images. In defining the baroque as the second moment of unease in the dominant model, Jay is relying upon Christine Buci-Glucksmann, whose work speaks to the baroque’s multiplicities of visual spaces, which are resistant to being reduced to any coherent essence. Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Hal Foster (ed.) Vision and Visuality (New York: The New Press, 1988), pp. 2–27.
- 4.
Ibid., p. 4.
- 5.
He himself wrote a study about the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought. See: Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Los Angeles, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
- 6.
Rorty summarizes the periods of the history of philosophy and defines the revolution then taking place with linguistic philosophy during the twentieth century: “The picture of ancient and medieval philosophy as concerned with things, the philosophy of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries with ideas, and the enlightened contemporary philosophical scene with words has considerable plausibility.” Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 263.
- 7.
The first English translation of Les mots et les choses (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1966) appeared in 1970, while Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature appeared in 1979.
- 8.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London, New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 19–50.
- 9.
This stance has been taken by Arthur C. Danto, and it has helped him to conceptualize his theory of the end of art, within which he generalizes pre-modernist art into a progressive model of the representational line of art (only expressionist art is excluded from this model), which started with Vasari and ended with modernist art. As he claims, this art strove to produce equivalences to perception experiences. See: Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
- 10.
The anecdote about the contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius testifies to the efforts of the painters of antiquity to produce visualizations that could be best described as optical deceptions. It was Zeuxis who depicted the grapes so well that the birds tried to eat them, but it was Parrhasius who won, since he deceived even his rival who was duped into demanding, “Come on, open that curtain and show me what you’ve painted,” when in fact it was the curtain itself that Parrhasius had depicted. One could easily use this anecdote to deconstruct Arthur C. Danto’s thesis about art’s striving towards increasingly better optical equivalences to perceptual experiences. Danto’s narration begins with Vasari, ends with photography and has its postscript in holography. Obviously there was something other than the increasingly more fidelitous production of optical equivalences to perceptual experiences that was of interest to art, even when it had a strong investment in producing so-called copies of the concrete world.
- 11.
One of the strongest critics of photography, Susan Sontag, conceptualized her critique of photography in conspicuously Platonic terms and even titled the lead essay of her book On Photography “In Plato’s Cave”. The quarrel between iconolaters and iconoclasts appeared specifically within the Christian context, while the Hebrew cultural tradition originates from speech, hearing and listening, which exceed vision and visuality—therefore, the prohibition of image-making also fits into this framework. The same thing holds for Islam. In the final instance, these differences make differences in cultural products and have great importance for the blossoming of visual arts and culture within the Christian world, while there is not much interest for visual culture within the Hebrew context.
- 12.
This moment will later become essential for Hegel’s theory of art: art and the artificial have a higher value than bare nature because art encompasses the spiritual and the Idea, which could not be found in bare nature.
- 13.
Katharine Everett Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn, A History of Esthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954), p. 9.
- 14.
The material world materializes ideas while mimetic images imitate the material representations of these ideas, thus making them second-order imitations.
- 15.
Plato, Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2004), Book 10, 603a10–603b1b, p. 307.
- 16.
Ibid., Book 3, 384b, p. 75.
- 17.
Ibid., 396b9–395c4, pp. 76–77.
- 18.
Halliwell also emphasizes Aristotle’s origins in Plato. See: Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (London: Duckworth, 1986), p. 119.
- 19.
Katharine Everett Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn, A History of Esthetics, p 62.
- 20.
Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. Leon Golden (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1981), chapter IV, p. 7.
- 21.
Gilbert and Kuhn, p. 62.
- 22.
Aristotle’s Poetics, chapter IV, p. 7.
- 23.
Aristotle, The Physics, trans. Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd., 1963), Book II, Chapter VIII, 199a, p. 173.
- 24.
Paul Woodruff, “Aristotle on Mimēsis,” in: Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Artistotle’s Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 78.
- 25.
In the Renaissance the interest in automata actually increased. Complex mechanical devices were known in ancient Greece, and in the 8th century Muslim inventors and engineers produced recipes for artificial snakes, scorpions, and humans (Jābir ibn Hayyān, Book of Stones). In his Book of Ceremonies (De Ceremoniis), Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (Constantine, 913–959) mentions three automata related to the “throne of Solomon”: trees with singing birds, roaring lions, and moving beasts. The western ambassador and chronicler Liudprand of Cremona also alluded to automata of lions and singing birds in the palace in his memoirs of his trip to Constantinople in 949. Several Byzantine chronicles give evidence of automata at the court of the emperor Theophilos (829–842). Furthermore, the Islamic world was fascinated with these fantastic devices. The Abbāsid palaces of the capital of Samarra may have had automata (Muslim accounts mention the amazement of two Byzantine ambassadors to the Abbāsid court in Baghdad in 917 at the sight of a lavish artificial tree with singing birds placed in a pond). In both cultures the contraptions were based on the same principles devised by the engineers of late antiquity, such as the 1st century inventor Heron of Alexandria. In 1206 the Artuqid sultan Nāşir ad-Dīn Mahmūd ordered a book on automata from his engineer Al-Jazari. In the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, the latter sketched and described fanciful devices, such as an elephant clock and a hand-washing device in the form of a servant pouring water from a pitcher that was driven by a complex hydraulic system. See: Mary-Lyon Dolezal and Maria Mavroudi, “Theodore Hyrtakenos’ Description of the Garden of St. Anna and the Ekphrasis of Gardens,” in: Antony Littlewood, Henry Maguire, and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (eds.), Byzantine Garden Culture (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), pp. 128. Around 1495 Leonardo da Vinci designed a humanoid automaton (a mechanical knight) that could independently maneuver its arms, stand, sit and raise its visor. The robotic system was operated by a series of pulleys and cables.
- 26.
They were also widely represented in popular culture—see for example the movie Blade Runner from 1982.
- 27.
Peter Laurie, The Joy of Computers (London: Hutchinson, 1983).
- 28.
ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, “Geminoid HI-1,” in: Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schöpf (eds.), Human Nature. Ars Electronica 2009 (Ostfildern: Hathe Cantz, 2009), p. 221.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
See FILMskin, a common project of the Federal Laboratory at Oak Ridge and NASA that is developing bionic skin for patients with burns.
- 31.
Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error. Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1994).
- 32.
Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, trans. John Francis Rigaud (London: George Bell & Sons, 1877), article 365, p. 156.
- 33.
Ibid., article 351, p. 150.
- 34.
Ibid., article 27, p. 10.
- 35.
It is worth noting that for da Vinci there is no such distinction between the interior and exterior of a body as we have drawn here. We have done so in order to emphasize his interest in the whole nature (composition, functionality, etc.) of the body and not only in its visual appearance; that is to say, da Vinci is yet another forceful reminder that mimesis is not at all equivalent to the mere resemblance of only the visual appearance of surfaces.
- 36.
Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, article 50, p. 17–18.
- 37.
Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 56.
- 38.
Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, article 112, p. 37.
- 39.
Foucault determines that the classical episteme takes place between the seventeenth and eighteenth century.
- 40.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 53.
- 41.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 45.
- 42.
Ibid., p. 4.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 12.
- 44.
Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, p. 47.
- 45.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 8.
- 46.
Ibid, p. 48.
- 47.
Ibid., p. 57.
- 48.
Ibid., p. 51.
- 49.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London, New York: Continuum, 2005), p. 11.
- 50.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 57.
- 51.
Francis Bacon, The New Organon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 42.
- 52.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 56.
- 53.
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy. With Selections from the Objections and Replies, trans. and ed. by John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 21.
- 54.
Ibid., p. 53.
- 55.
Ibid., p. 47.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 48. Descartes, however, admits the frequency with which his mind is puzzled because he cannot fix his mental vision continually on the same thing so as to keep perceiving it clearly; thus the memory of a previously made judgment may often come back when he is no longer attending to the arguments which led him to make it.
- 57.
Stephen S. Hall, Mapping the Next Millennium, pp. 8–9.
- 58.
As many others did, the esteemed British cartographer John Speed depicted California as an island in his 1627 map of America.
- 59.
Hall, p. 383.
- 60.
The scanning, slicing, and photographing took place at the University of Colorado Health’s Sciences Center, where additional cutting of anatomical specimens and gathering of data is still in process. An ethical polemic has been taking place regarding the donors of whole bodies to the Visible Human Project. The male cadaver is from Joseph Paul Jernigan, a 38-year-old American who was executed and who agreed to donate his body for scientific research or medical use, but did not know about the project. The donor of the female body remains anonymous.
- 61.
http://visiblehuman.epfl.ch/, 6-29-2012.
- 62.
Francis Bacon, The New Organon, p. 46.
- 63.
Peter R. Anstey, “Experimental Versus Speculative Natural Philosophy”, in: Peter R. Anstey and John A. Schuster (eds.), The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century. Patterns of Change in Early Modern Natural Philosophy, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 19 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), p. 215.
- 64.
Quoted by Anstey; ibid., p. 220.
- 65.
Ibid., p. 238.
- 66.
Quoted in Anstey, ibid., p. 225.
- 67.
Emily Booth, “A Subtle and Mysterious Machine.” The Medical World of Walter Charleton (1619-1707) Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 18 (Dordrecht, Springer, 2005), p. 171.
- 68.
Cynthia Klestinec, “Practical Experience in Anatomy”, in: Charles T. Wolfe and Ofer Gal (eds.), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge. Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 25 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), p. 36.
- 69.
Ibid., p. 43. Annually, there was a public anatomy demonstration held in the winter months, but in the late sixteenth century students preferred the tradition of the private anatomy, which was marked by an ebullient reappraisal of peritia and its transformation into a virtue of the university-trained practitioner. These private events were conducted on a smaller scale and were rather elite.
- 70.
Ibid., pp. 44–45.
- 71.
Robert Hooke, Micrographia, preface, Octavo (CD-Rom edition), 1998 (cop. London: The Warnock Library, 1665), n. p.
- 72.
Ibid., n. p.
- 73.
Quoted in: Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris, “Empiricism Without the Senses: How the Instrument Replaced the Eye,” in: Charles T. Wolfe, Ofer Gal (eds.), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge, p. 123.
- 74.
Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris claim that in the seventeenth century new instruments, such as the telescope and later the microscope, did not offer an extension and improvement of the senses, but rather replaced them altogether. The eye was to become a part of the instrument. Researchers were relying on the authority of their instruments, and therefore the human eye was itself nothing but a flawed instrument. As claimed by Gal and Chen-Morris, for Kepler and Galileo the eye lost its autonomous capacity to observe and assure knowledge—it was instead immersed in nature, a part of the very sorts of things that were to be observed. The telescope, on the contrary, was not bound to the physical world, but was instead mathematical in essence, or so Galileo believed (1623). Magnification is a mathematical relation, and the telescope does the job of magnification, regardless of the collaboration of the eye, irrespective of whether it perceives or not. (Ibid., p. 141) Even for empiricists, the eye and the senses in general had become unreliable and perception deficient, while the instruments became infallible because they enabled insight, they imparted the ability to behold the works of Nature, which man then had the capacity to consider, compare, alter, assist and improve, thus making humankind superior to other species, or so Hooke believed: “It is the great prerogative of Mankind above other Creatures, that we are not only able to behold the works of Nature, or barely to sustein our lives by them, but we have also the power of considering, comparing, altering, assisting, and improving them to various uses.” (Robert Hooke, Micrographia, preface, n.p.).
- 75.
- 76.
- 77.
Ibid.
- 78.
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical Perception (London, New York: Routledge, 2003), p. xv.
- 79.
Ibid., p. xiii.
- 80.
Ibid.
- 81.
Ibid.
- 82.
Ibid.
- 83.
Ibid.
- 84.
Ibid., p. xiv.
- 85.
Ibid.
- 86.
Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, trans. Henry Copley Greene, A.M. (New York: Henry Schuman, Inc., 1949), p. 5.
- 87.
Ibid.
- 88.
Beaumont observed the digestion process in his patient Alexis St. Martin, who was accidentally shot and got a hole (fistula) in his stomach that had not closed. Thus, Beaumont got and used the opportunity to conduct a series of experiments with the digestion of food during the normal conscious states of his patient.
- 89.
Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, p. 166.
- 90.
Ibid., p. xix.
- 91.
We are of course referring to Derrida here. This issue will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.
- 92.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible, 6-29-2012.
- 93.
Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, p. 169.
- 94.
Hall, p. 143.
- 95.
Vilém Flusser, Writings (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 24.
- 96.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind”, in: Galen A. Johnson (ed.), The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Philosophy and Painting (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p. 138.
- 97.
Donna Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto. Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in: David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (eds.), The Cybercultures Reader (London, New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 303.
- 98.
Cytosine, guanine, adenine (DNA and RNA), thymine (DNA) and uracil (RNA), abbreviated as C, G, A, T, and U.
- 99.
Donna Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies. Determinations of Self in Immune System Discourse,” in: Shirley Lindenbaum and Margaret Lock (eds.), Knowledge, Power, and Practice: the Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 367.
- 100.
Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London, New York: Continuum, 2006).
- 101.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), Book 3, 481, p. 267.
- 102.
If language is a highly conventional form of communication that links signifiers to signifieds, then we can no longer speak of convention here, since this is a discourse that was not established by the human species and thus it was not man who established the code for this language. Yet, the code is very complex, thus we could say that the semiological network is “highly encoded.” It is worth mentioning that genetic engineers, including synthetic biologists, still believe they need to figure out the language with which they might program DNA. They need to learn the language, and this knowledge will enable them to intervene into genes and gain mastery over the genetic program of humankind.
- 103.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London, New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 7.
- 104.
Ibid., p. xviii.
- 105.
Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, p. 16.
- 106.
Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in: Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964), p. 51.
- 107.
Ibid., p. 33.
- 108.
Ibid., p. 32.
- 109.
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, p. 8.
- 110.
Ibid.
- 111.
Flusser, Writings, p. 90.
- 112.
Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, p. 8.
- 113.
Ibid., p. 10.
- 114.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 115.
Ibid.
- 116.
Ibid., p. 17.
- 117.
Ibid., p. 12.
- 118.
Flusser, Writings, p. 88.
- 119.
Ibid.
- 120.
Vilém Flusser, “On Discovery,” in Artforum, New York, Vol. 26, No. 1 (September 1987), p. 10.
- 121.
Vilém Flusser, “On Discovery,” in: Artforum, New York, Vol. 27, No. 7 (March 1988), p. 14.
- 122.
Ibid.
- 123.
Flusser, “On Discovery,” Summer 1988, p. 17–18.
- 124.
The term synthetic biology was actually introduced a century ago (Stéphane Leducs, 1910). In the 1970s the field became especially promising: Waclaw Szybalski was aware that it actually had unlimited expansion potential, particularly in the development of new control elements and application of these elements to existing genomes, to say nothing of the construction of whole new genomes altogether.
- 125.
Craig Venter was the leader of the team in Celera that, parallel with the public Human Genome Project, worked on generating the sequence of the human genome. Both teams announced the mapping of the human genome at the same time: Celera published its results in Science, and the group managed by Francis Collins of the National Institute of Health in the U.S.A. followed with publication in Nature. Celera used DNA from five demographically different individuals, one being Venter himself. The teams, however, used different methods: Celera’s method was shotgun sequencing, while the Human Genome Project used the clone-by-clone method.
- 126.
Elizabeth Pennisi, “Synthetic Genome Brings New Life to Bacterium,” Science 21 May 2010: Vol. 328 no. 5981 pp. 958–959. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5981/958.full, 7-5-2012.
- 127.
Vilém Flusser, “On Discovery,” in: Artforum, New York, Vol. 26, No. 2 (October 1987), p. 12.
- 128.
Flusser, “On Discovery,” Summer 1988, p. 18.
- 129.
Genesis 2:7.
- 130.
Flusser, “On Discovery,” March 1988, pp. 14–15.
- 131.
Flusser, “On Discovery,” Summer 1988, p. 18.
- 132.
Ibid.
- 133.
John Fiske, Television Culture (London, New York: Routledge, 1987), p. 281–308.
- 134.
Vilém Flusser, “On Discovery,” in: Artforum, New York, Vol. 27, No. 2 (October 1988), p. 9.
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Tratnik, P. (2017). Conquest of Body: Mapping, Knowing, Mastering. In: Conquest of Body. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57324-3_1
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