Note: I was not able to get a full PDF copy of the original article from the UMI archives, which is a bummer. They just didn’t respond for some reason. So I had to text-scan the PDF and try to conjure what I might have said towards the end of the original review. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Afterimage – April 1993
REVIEWS

Incorporations

Edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter
New York: Zone Books, 1992
633 pages / $34.95 (paperback)
Reviewed by Julian C. Bleecker

As the “New World Order” rhetoric suggests, we are at a time of transition. Now is the time that millions of us are urged to chalk our sordid twentieth century up to vaguely meaningful experiences and news headlines, slot a slab of silicon into our sagging pectorals, and walk intrepidly into the third millennium. However, the difficulty with such seemingly courageous acts of modern living and jaunts into the sci-tech future of improbability is a reciprocal loss of the meaning of our past and the problems that have accumulated to create our hardly ideal contemporary condition.

Edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, distributed by MIT Press, and published by Zone Books, Zone 6: Incorporations (1992) serves as both a reality check on our contemporaneity and an incisive view across the terrain of the twentieth century, ultimately forming a comprehensive and diverse anthology of modern life experience.

Incorporations is timely, published as it is near the close of the twentieth century. It is presented as an anthology that attempts to determine exactly what ideological models have brought us to where we are today, to a critical, self-reflexive moment in contemporary society. And rather than a focus of different ideas addressing a common theme, what Incorporations presents are multiple foci corralled under the aegis of the centuries-old debate of the cultural, scientific, and technological factors contributing to the body’s evolving meanings.

The Zone publisher’s catalog concisely states that Incorporations is an “examination of the multiple emergences, over the last century, of new models of life based on biological and technological developments going back to the 18th and 19th centuries.” The motivation for this kind of project is the rapid pace of cultural change, as well as technological and scientific developments. A wealth of scholarship addressing the “body and humanity contextualized via technology” debate has been generated around every new technological development—from Video Display Terminals (VDTs) and the Human Genome Project to cellular phone brain tumors. Entire curriculums have been developed to address developments of such magnitude; the broad-based cultural studies field is an example.

But catalog description aside, Incorporations addresses a much more general, yet no less pressing question: “How are we to understand and contextualize our sense of our individual humanity at the close of the twentieth century?”

Few publishers would attempt a work as diverse, cross-cutting, and as intellectually and physically imposing as Incorporations. Given their recent history of anthologies with these qualities, Zone Books is well-positioned to undertake a production that sets forth to outline the complexity of human life. Yet the scope, diversity, and physical girth of Incorporations raises a question—what cohesive themes could possibly be articulated, and at what levels of introspection?

The most compelling distinction among the essays in Incorporations is revealed in the title. “Incorporations” reveals both subject positions within large structures and subject positions among the social milieu created by the dynamic intersection, cooption, and refiguration of local and global consciousness. We variously lament or celebrate living within a society that includes prodigious fields such as bioengineering, which provides new drugs and procedures unheard of ten years ago. We are also individually reshaped and politicized by developments in these fields—the bioengineered drug RU-486 is just one example.

We should be aware of the mechanisms by which we are (collectively) incorporated into the systems that have made society modern. The analysis of this sort in the book is almost always historical, as in Judith Barry’s “Mappings—A Chronology of Remote Sensing,” which reveals in two concise pages 130 years of the progressive remapping not only of physical terrains through above-ground surveillance, but also new forms of power governing our lives as a result of being able to see over the neighbor’s backyard fence.

What is constantly articulated in Barry’s chronology is the capture of surveillance images from platforms “up above,” structures built upon the physics of buoyancy and orbits—structures of power and influence. The capture of images in this manner is to integrate planetary life seamlessly, with little respect for the meanings of individuality. But life within (or literally below) this arrangement forced new forms of mass consciousness, such as our understanding of “Mother Earth” as a holistic element to be treated with reverence. This conception really only became possible when satellite photographs created the appropriate representation of an ecologically fragile sphere.

But twentieth-century living encompasses more than mass subjects crammed into the bureaucratic filing system of the modern surveillance state. What is in many ways more revealing are observations of the way the state and corporate mind operate in our local lives and reshape understandings of ourselves. J. G. Ballard reminds us that ultimately we are responsible for resisting dubious evolutions of our humanity when he seeks to understand the meaning of “X-ray” in his “Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century”:

Does the body still exist at all, in any but the most mundane sense? Its role has been steadily diminished, so that it seems little more than a ghostly shadow seen on the X-ray plate of our moral disapproval. We are now entering a colonialist phase in our attitudes to the body, full of paternalistic notions that conceal ruthless exploitation carried out for its own good… Will the body at last rebel, tip all those vitamins, douches and aerobic schedules into Boston harbor and throw off the colonialist oppressor?

Life among corporate slogans like “We Bring Good Things to Life,” or designer vitamins and tonics might be understood as a newer, more cloaked form of colonialism of the mind—mass marketing style. Or it may be that Ballard’s theme signposts the latest meanings of human biology and of machine technology.

The assumption of the industrial era is that life should emulate machinic qualities such as efficiency, repetition, and predictability, based on the models of nineteenth-century modes of production and labor. Didier Deleule points this out in “The Living Machine”:

The body… projects its vital energy into a totally mechanistic structure so that no surprises are possible… this projection is maintained by virtue of the fact that the organism must be understood as an imitative object designed to carry out complex productive activities.

Since the period Deleule focuses on (roughly the nineteenth century), the ideology of the machine has gone through several transformations and is moving through another set of assumptions. The classical assumption of the body invested with divine, irreproducible perfection gave way to the industrial-era beliefs discussed by Deleule and then to the impression that the machine would—or at least could—emulate life, itself an idea that has not always been agreed upon but nonetheless is a consistently compelling model.

The most common example of this split occurred in the middle decades of this century when projects to develop artificially intelligent technologies won the favor of the Pentagon. Now we are starting to see artificial intelligence give way to the embodiment and inscription of humanistic qualities (smartness, life, intuition, and friendliness) into technology—smart bombs, artificial life in computer algorithms, machines that are “intuitive” in their operations or “user-friendly.”

It is not clear how far the inversion from the classical assumption will go. How much humanistic “soul” could possibly be invested in technology is an open question, but the act of playing God—which would represent a full inversion from the classical assumption—has been a topic of critical debate, particularly for those wary of the practices of genetic engineers who attempt to create genetically new and altered life forms.

Donna Haraway’s short piece “When Man™ Is on the Menu” describes, in a metaphor, the problematic ambivalence with which genetic engineers routinely assign product status to the techno-organic lives they produce. The DuPont Corporation’s OncoMouse™, a living mouse “designed” through the science of applied genetics to be unusually likely to get cancer tumors, has become an organic product with a trademark, insertable into the lucrative economy of medicine and cancer diagnostics. Haraway asks us to consider that we (“humans”) may become technological products in the same way: by the very act of describing other life forms as technology, and by our propensity to imagine ourselves in the web of bioengineered fantasies. “What kind of cultural action will forbid the evolution of OncoMouse™ into Man™?”

Creative interpretations of the distinction between the classical assumption and the more recent convergence of biology and technology are liberally distributed in Incorporations, and make for a cohesive and topical theme among several other less well-defined themes. The more contemporary biotech melding signals what Crary and Kwinter figure as the “modern problem of life… the organism and machine.”

Only a fraction of the essays addressing this motif approach it as more than a problem to be treated historically or, worse, merely endured. Calls for action, as in Ballard and Haraway’s pieces, are only a bit more than rare, but they do represent important examples of how Incorporations attempts to guide our intrepid first steps into the twenty-first century without making one giant stumble for all of humankind.

One of the most compelling aspects of Incorporations is its diverse points of view. The disciplines represented range from film production, architecture, and philosophy of science to history, studio arts, and scientific research. In this sense Incorporations fits its description as an “examination of multiple emergences.”

One confusing, and often frustrating, problem with Incorporations is the almost perpetual inbreeding of ideas among the authors…

…[CONCLUDING TEXT MISSING FROM ORIGINAL SCAN. BELOW IS WHAT I WAS PROBABLY FEELING BUT WROTE OTHERWISE]…

…such that as a reader and graduate student one wonders about the chumminess of the intellectual circles represetned. This is as much my own concerns about being such an outsider to the world of critical theory as it is a genuine observation about the sometimes incestuous nature of academic discourse. Nonetheless, the diversity of disciplines represented in Incorporations is impressive, and the cross-disciplinary fertilization of ideas is often productive.

Julian C. Bleecker, the reviewer, recently completed an M.S. thesis on virtual reality, vision culture, and technology at the University of Washington.