Thyrza Nichols Goodeve

Before the panel the participants met at a small cocktail gathering and I was immediately asked, "Are you the cyborg or are you on the surrealist side?" - an opposition that threw me. Perhaps I am the transitional object between the surrealists and the cyborgs but the point is that they are not separate worlds but a shared territory descriptive of our current historical moment.

Before continuing I need to clarify the issue of the cyborg and its connection to everyday life. The cyborg, as it is theorized by Donna Haraway, is very much a child of surrealism as much as it is a child of the military. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential." I'd like to know how many people here have read "A Manifesto for Cyborgs"? Let’s see a show of hands. [Few hands go up.] Okay, it's crazy to even be talking about the cyborg without the audience having read her essay, because her use of the cyborg represents a very deep and philosophical debate and without it as background the discussion sounds silly. She uses the word cyborg to describe, in fictional imagery, serious ontological and epistemological rifts and transformations wrought by our current technoscientific, media-ized, digital world where law students can now specialize in law predicated on the inalienable right of animals.

She wrote "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" in 1984 and 85. (Yes, Haraway’s cyborg myth, like surrealism, began as a manifesto). It is republished in her book Simeans Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Women. Please go get it and read it. It is difficult and may seem inexplicable at moments but look for the concrete examples she uses. Her argument is not theory bereft of a relationship with the real. In fact, the book I did with her, How Like a Leaf, I did because I wanted people to see how experiential her notion of this new kind of subjectivity and political identity is (I repeat: new subjectivity and political identity: the Manifesto is not about part machine part flesh cartoon figures). It is about a notion of who we are in relationship to historical and technological changes which have taken place since World War II. When I asked her the question, " When is the moment that experientially you experienced what it was to be a cyborg?", her answer was fabulous: "I guess it would have to be the first time I realized how like a leaf I am." She has a PhD in biology so she knows of what she speaks. But as an historian of biology, her contribution has been to draw upon imagination and research as a combined field of historical description. Metaphor is her tool. And in fact in Modest_Witness@ Second Millennium. Female Man© Meets_Oncomouse.™ she uses the term "cyborg surrealism" to describe her very methodology.

A shorthand way of describing the shift from the kind of notions of human present at the time of historical surrealism and those of cyborg surrealism is to look at The Fly from 1958 in comparison to The Fly directed by Cronenberg in the 1980s (made around the same time Haraway is theorizing the Cyborg Manifesto). In the original Fly film, the doctor goes through the teleporter and is accidently spliced with a common house fly. "Spliced" is the operative word here. He emerges with the head and arm of a fly stuck on, as if by collage, onto to his body. The distinction between fly body and human body is clearly delineated. It looks to us in the 21st century patently artificial and funny. But in Cronenberg's Fly, the transformation is much more total. The transformation occurs on the molecular level. He becomes a new being on the cellular level, a hybrid, bred from a technological miscegenation between fly and human.

Okay, let’s move to the present. In contemporary art the word surrealist is used often to describe the work of artists such as Matthew Barney, Aziz and Cucher, Matthew Richie and others. In fact I could have just brought in slides, and said, ‘This looks very surrealist,’ and stop there. But the point is to think about what kind of surrealism such work evokes, or how it is different from historical surrealism. Such art emerges out of a very different moment in time when boundaries between human vs. non human were more in tact (e.g. the 50s Fly versus the 80s Fly). In a world where we must ask the question what is Brundlefly’s unconscious, surrealism cannot be attributed to art lightly.

Let’s backtrack to Haraway again and to her term "cyborg surrealism." She uses the term to describe her analysis of contemporary genetics and technoscience. Haraway is a very funny person. She is always making jokes. When she introduced the word "cyborg" in the mid 80s to describe this new kind of subjectivity and embodiment, she decribed her manifesto as blasphemous: "At the center of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg." So one has to see the jokes in her work, the power of irony to make serious points that otherwise go unsaid. Cyborg surrealism is what she would call a serious joke. As you’ll hear, language in Donna Haraway’s work is very thick. You have to read her like an avant-garde filmmaker working through the layers of meaning and collage of ideas. It's very slow and must be done with care.

Here is a quote:

"…my cyborg figures inhabit a mutated time-space regime that I call technobiopower. Intersecting with – and sometimes displacing –the development, fulfillment, and containment proper to figural realism, the temporal modality pertaining to cyborgs is condensation, fusion, and implosion."

Note, she is specifically calling upon a system of description that, as with Breton’s surrealism, is no longer interested in figural realism. But "fusion" here is not just a metaphor but the very description of transgenics (where the genes from one organism are mixed with those of another to create a… well, a BrundleFly.) As I have previously done in an another essay on Moriko Mori in Parkett let me juxtapose two quotes. One by Breton, the other by Haraway:

"Breton: I demand that he who still refuses... to see a horse galloping on a tomato should be looked upon as a cretin."

Haraway: "I find myself especially drawn by such engaging new beings as the tomato with a gene from a cold-sea-bottom-living flounder which codes for a protein that slows freezing, and the potato with a gene from the giant silk moth, which increases disease resistance. DNA Plant technology, Oakland, California, started testing the tomato-fish antifreeze combination in 1991."

In Breton’s time you'd have one species on one side of a division and another on the other, separate and differentiated. No pollution. No Brundlefly, only Breton’s and other surrealists like Max Ernst’s wild "surreal" juxtapositions.

What is important for purposes of this talk is the question of the unconscious in the world of transgenics and cyborg identity, since surrealism originated in the investigation, mining, exploration of the unconscious. The unconscious is something we can never know, except through symptoms, dreams, repetitious and perplexing behavior. So, I wonder what kind of an unconscious is being produced in this cyborg world, in this fused world, where human is a contested and complicated figure. Is it the same unconscious as Freud's? Freud’s unconscious was developed within the context of the nuclear family. In other words through mom and dad and the ideology of family life ruled by patriarchy. We don't really have a simple mom and dad world anymore. And patriarchy may still be here but it certainly has changed. Instead we have bioengineering and in-vitro fertilization and all sorts of reproductive technologies outside of the body, like sperm banks. So we have to start to ask: what kind of an unconscious emerges within a context where one’s origins can be created in the laboratory?

And if we go back to 1900, which was when Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, which he described as containing "the most valuable of all the discoveries it is my good fortune to make" we also find it is the exact same year as the birth of modern genetics. The year 1900 is when the 19th century monk, Gregory Mendel's ideas of smooth versus wrinkled traits passed down through several generations of the pea plant, were rediscovered. The term gene appeared in 1909. So there's actually a kind of historical link between genetics and psychoanalysis, where genetics went off in one direction, psychoanalysis in another, and now the time is to think about their histories as a combined life-form. In particular Haraway calls for the theorization of " an unfamiliar unconscious, a different primal scene, where everything does not stem from the drama of identity and reproduction." So what is this new unfamiliar unconscious? I will say that, along with many other things, what Matthew Barney is doing in his Cremaster cycle is exploring and producing the language and imagery of this other, unfamiliar unconscious.

How much of the Cremaster have people seen? This is the problem in talking about Matthew Barney. I’m going to show a clip from Cremaster 2. It's a scene where a seance is intercut with sex between a male body whose penis releases a bee after sex and a female body with a winged labia strapped in a clear plastic corset (fig. 1).

[After the clip:]

So, what did you just see? It's very dangerous to talk about Matthew Barney’s work, especially extemporaneously, because the temptation is to get lost in a comprehensive description of the project, which is impossible to do quickly. The sequence you saw incorporates a myth of the criminal Gary Gilmore from Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song and Mikal Gilmore’s Shot in the Heart. Gary Gilmore was in prison in the late 70s for murder. He requested to be put to death by firing squad at a time when the death penalty had not been used for decades. Barney incorporates Gilmore into his narrative of the Cremaster, which he describes as, among other things, the story of the development of a person. (The Cremaster muscle controls the rising or lowering of the male testicle. Symbolically for Barney it represents a process of differentiation.) Barney is interested in a Gilmore family myth that suggests Gary’s father, Frank, is the illegitimate son of Harry Houdini. For Barney, who has used Houdini in previous work to represent the idea of transformation through physical transformation, what he calls physical intuition, Gilmore becomes a way to collapse, or fuse, in a surrealist dream-like drama, several layers of being and meaning.

In the sequence you just saw, you see a séance involving Gary Gilmore’s paternal grandmother Fay (a medium who, so the myth goes, met Houdini at the 1893 Chicago Columbia Exposition and had an affair), Frank (Gary Gilmore’s father) and Bessie (Gary Gilmore’s mother whose name just happens to be the same as Houdini’s wife’s). Following the séance between genetically related mother and son and ceremonially wedded husband and wife, is the scene of sex involving the transparent corseted female with winged labia, mounting a male who, upon pulling out, releases a bee from his penis. His abdomen then explodes, oozing honey. (In bee culture if the drone mates successfully with the queen his abdomen swells, bursts, and he dies.) What image of conception is this? What would Freud do with this primal scene where humans and bees merge into an unfamiliar world of sexual reproduction? A word from Haraway," I insist that social relationships include non-humans as well as humans as socially …active partners. All that is unhuman is not un-kind, outside kinship…"

Donna Haraway has always been ambivalent about psychoanalysis precisely because the nuclear family is the framework for understanding the construction of our unconscious. She has often said, "I'd much rather have a story built upon the reproductive capacities of a fern than of the nuclear family." Well here Matthew Barney is producing a moment of conception where humans and bees participate in a kind of transgenic orgasm. In other words, and this is how I will leave you, Barney’s 5-part Cremaster, of which you have only seen a fraction, is a story of creation and creativity, a counter myth to Freud’s Oedipus, as blasphemous, and poignant as Haraway’s. In sum, Cremaster is the founding epic of cyborg surrealism.