ON THE QUESTION OF THE HUMAN: A GENERAL ECONOMY OF CONTEMPORARY TASTES A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Michelle Martin May, 2013 Examining Committee Members: Daniel T. O’Hara, Advisory Chair, English Alan Singer, English Sue-Im Lee, English Eric Savoy, External Member, Université de Montréal © Copyright 2013 by Michelle Martin All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT In the latter half of the 20th-century and into the 21st, William Burroughs, Samuel Delany, and bioartists such as Oron Catts, Orlan, and Stelarc have all attempted to create works which respond to the increasing biopoliticization of contemporary society. The biopolitics of today seek to regularize life and structure it according to the imperatives of economic thought, a process by which the human becomes the Foucauldian homo œconomicus. This restricted logic of biopolitics desperately tries to cover the explosive excess of the world today, what Bataille calls general economy. The artists under consideration in this work attempt to uncover this state of excess. While they are typically seen as exploring fantastic realms of the transgressive or, in the case of bioartists, attempting to emulate science fiction, in fact it is their realism which provokes. These artists reveal the heterological body, that which cannot be contained or described by the biopolitical regime. In so doing, they rewrite our standards of taste and point the way to understandings of the human that have been otherwise unavailable to us. William Burroughs in Naked Lunch highlights the manipulability of affect in contemporary society through the reduction of the human to bare life. He uses the figure of flesh/meat as a way of depicting the heterogeneous body and to generate a counter- affect, or free-floating affect, which unlike typical affect, is not worked up into emotion. Samuel Delany, too, describes the heterogeneous or destabilized body in the heterotopia of his novel Dhalgren. While Burroughs is unable or unwilling to gesture towards the potentially radical implications of the heterogeneous body, Delany proposes a new model of community that rests upon the revelation of the heterogeneous body, a community which acts as one informed by an affirmative biopolitics. Bioart, a somewhat vexed genre of art, attempts to construct artworks that both utilize and critique new science and technology of the body. The life sciences are complicit in the rise of the biopolitical state and further the view of the human as constrained by its material substrate. Fetishistic bioart problematically reproduces a fascination with the life sciences and advanced technology. However, the bioart which I call sacred has a demystifying effect and attempts to use the knowledge gained by the life sciences to expand our understanding of the human, going beyond the bounds of that very knowledge itself. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to express my gratitude to my committee members, Daniel T. O’Hara, Alan Singer, and Sue-Im Lee, for all their help during the process of writing this work. Dr. O’Hara, especially, has been ceaseless in his support and guidance. I would also like to thank my husband, Phil Mahoney, for being my fellow traveler, keeping my spirits up and my humor from being too cynical. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. vi CHAPTER 1. OVERTURNING THE BIOPOLITICAL STATE: FROM HOMO ŒCONOMICUS TO THE HETEROGENEOUS BODY ........................................1 2. THE BODY AS MEAT: SACRIFICE’S AFFECT IN WILLIAM BURROUGHS’S NAKED LUNCH .......................................................................51 3. THE LIVING THESIS: DHALGREN, THE HETEROGENEOUS BODY, AND THE FORMATION OF SACRED COMMUNITY ....................................97 4. AT THE FRONTIERS OF ART AND SCIENCE: TABOO AND TRANSGRESSION IN BIOART ........................................................................138 REFERENCES CITED ....................................................................................................188 viii CHAPTER 1 OVERTURNING THE BIOPOLITICAL STATE: FROM HOMO ŒCONOMICUS TO THE HETEROGENEOUS BODY In the following work, I will argue that the transgressive works of the artists under consideration – William Burroughs, Samuel Delany, and a number of artists practicing what is called bioart – enlarge an understanding of the human through a questioning and reworking of the standards of taste to effect what I will call a general economy of taste. General economy, as defined by French philosopher and writer Georges Bataille, a thinker who will be integral to my study, is the state of the world today, a state of explosive excess. A general economy of taste is an interrogation of the standards of taste which indicts not just these standards but all the social norms that determine what does and does not count as human. Like Bataille’s, the works of these artists are renowned for their transgressive content – the violence, the sex, the scatological references, the drug use, etc – and for their formal experimentation. While critics of these artists often characterize them as surrealists or fantasists, contrary to this accepted position, I believe that it is precisely these writers’ realism that provokes. This fuller realism contradicts what might be called their audience’s reality effect or even their superego. The disruption of this reality effect has important consequences for aesthetics, ethics, and politics. These works give the lie to what may be summarily described as contemporary biopolitics, connecting to both 1 Foucault’s theorization of the regularization and disciplinarization of life and Agamben’s postulation of “bare life.” These artists’ realistic works present a dystopian vision of the world today; however, while they do not offer a coherent program for a perfect society, they do retain something of a utopian hope: they reveal the heterological body, the body that is excluded from discourse, and suggest instead that the human is or can be, like Nietzsche’s Übermensch, something more than this. Generally-speaking, criticism on the artists under consideration can be classified in two ways. The first, which characterizes both popular commentary and a number of examples of academic scholarship, is to treat their works as cultural and legal touchstones in the history of the dialectic between obscenity and censorship. While certainly my own analysis will address this history, I aim to move beyond it, as such an approach is limited both by its dependence on the historical particulars of the standards of taste at the time of publication and release, thus seemingly losing any contemporary relevance, and by the simple reactive and negating power it ascribes to the works in question. The second approach is also a historicizing one, but in this case, it takes place solely within the field of literary criticism and concerns the issue of periodization. Brian McHale in Postmodernist Fiction, Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism, Patricia Waugh in Metafiction, and Timothy Murphy in Wising Up the Marks all discuss the novels of Burroughs or Delany or both in terms of situating the modern/postmodern divide. McHale, for example, sees Delany’s works as constraining its postmodernist ontological themes via its modernist epistemological framework, while Burroughs’s fiction is too ontologically disorienting to be effective satirically, though McHale concedes he may be a “superior postmodernist” (117). Timothy Murphy’s monograph on 2 Burroughs is an illustrative example of a critic trying to escape the reified categories of modernism and postmodernism. He proposes instead a new term, “amodern,” to describe Burroughs’s work. If the term itself were not clue enough that rather than giving these terms the slip he has joined arms with them, his definition seems to rest on a blending of the two rather than a radical break. “Amodernism,” according to Murphy, “accepts the failure of modernist ends…without taking the additional step of homogenizing all remaining difference” (2). Amodernism does not come after postmodernism, but is something like postmodernism’s contemporaneous antagonist. Or maybe it would be more in keeping with the essence of Murphy’s argument to say that amodernism is the protagonist, as Murphy claims that amodernism retains something of the utopian. Though Murphy’s work on Burroughs is an important contribution to Burroughs scholarship, the addition of yet another periodizing term is questionable. What is to be gained by positing amodernism as something subtly different than postmodernism rather than another variant of it? Is the shifting of periodizing markers the value in itself? I plan to move beyond both a historical account of obscenity and censorship and a reallocation of periodizing resources. I will instead show how via an interrogation of contemporary aesthetic judgment these artists challenge the current regime of taste, offering in its place what I will call a general economy of taste. It might seem counter- intuitive to address these works, known for their grotesque images, brutal themes, and propensity for arousing discomfort in their audiences, to the aesthetic judgment, typically associated with, to borrow from Kant’s language, the harmony of the faculties and