Biomedia in the time of animation

How does mediated time become human (historically, affectively)? What can the results of an attention to ‘new’ mediation tell us about duration as embodiment and about becoming human in time? This essay approaches the question of when we become post/human through an exploration of anatomical images that mark the connection between bodies/embodiment and the historical reproduction of knowledge. These transhistorical images offer competing glimpses of the reproduction of bodies in time and the temporality of mediated embodiment. The various modes of mediation that these images embody impose or evade a transtime, a temporality caught up in the production of mediated time as a form of bio-reproduction. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 46–55. doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.4 Nay, come, let’s go together. Hamlet, 1.5.190 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 46–55 www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/ Figure 1: Josh Hanson, ‘Topsy the Electrocuted Elephant’. Note: The cartoon, ‘Topsy: the Electrocuted Elephant’, is reproduced here; courtesy of Josh Hanson (http://topsytheelectrocutedelephant.blogspot.com/). W h e n Did We Become Post /Human? The images I survey here – two scenes of early modern dissection, introspection and the literal production of bodies of knowledge – answer that question with a resounding and re-iterative now, now, now. These images are visible sutures that mark the connection between bodies/embodiment and the historical reproduction of knowledge. But these images are also mediating events that defy a historical fixing of all the conceptual narratives we might impose on them: the emergence of science; the barbarity or progress of early medicine; or the contaminations of the secular and religious divide in early modern scenes of enlightened technoscience – each in a very different way. These anatomical scenes offer up a form of biomediation that becomes, in effect, an animation. I am conceiving of animation here not in the strict sense of pixilated or mechanically manipulated images in succession; nor am I imagining the ways in which these images metaphorically impart life (or death). I want to think with these images as a variation on the form of animation that Judith Halberstam has re-framed as ‘transbiological’ (Halberstam, 2008; see also Franklin and Roberts, 2006), as events that play at the margins of bodily re-production as ‘made and born’ (Franklin and Roberts, 2006, 171). Halberstam uses examples of pixilated, filmic animations to explore how such mediated events shift the meanings and boundaries of the intersectional emergences of ‘humans, animals, machines, states of life and death, animation, reanimation, living, evolving, becoming and transforming’ (Halberstam, 2008, 266). I invoke this term to pose the question of how, as mediated events, these early modern anatomical images impose or evade a transtime, a temporality caught up in the production of mediated time as a form of bio-reproduction. Animation in this sense asks how we can think of modes of duration as an ethos of bodily reproduction. That is, how does mediated time become human (historically, affectively)? What can the results of an attention to ‘new’ mediation tell us about duration as embodiment and about becoming human in time? Katherine Hayles’s more recent work poses the question of pre/present/ post-humanness as such: How does the body know time? (Hayles, 2008). This is an inquiry applicable in so many senses to our rapidly evolving moment as we click through, log on and interface (emphasis here on our tendency still to privilege new modes of media as space/place, not time). But it is also a question that re-frames the question of what time can mean – in time and as time. And here we may have something timely, something new. Is it possible that critical conversations surrounding the field of new media provide new affordances for an affective reading of time as embodiment? Can these registers of affective mediation speak to what potential we might conjure in doing history? As such, how does the body know time? How does time know the body? 1 My use of terms in this essay is also in conversation with Bryan Reynolds’ transversal theory, a ‘spacetime encompassing, among other known and unknown qualities, the nonsubjectified regions of individuals’ conceptualemotional range’ (Reynolds, 2006, 16–17). Biomedia in the time of animation 47 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 46–55 How Does Time Know the Body? Leiden, 1610. This early anatomical image (Figure 2) is baroquely artful in a way few of the later images manage. Allegories abound; and skeletal proxies for Adam and Eve are at the tree, front and center, to complicate the whole scene from the onset. The circular observation barriers work to constrain all these competing symbolic and allegorical energies, but it is finally a scene of spatial and temporal complexity. Space is often a principal interest in the scholarship surrounding early modern anatomy theaters (Sawday, 1996; Carlino, 1999). But time has received consideration as well: allegorical time, the time of/in readership and the duration of performance stretched across its function as a scientific act and as a theatrical production. But in this image there is another element of time that informs how it nervously feels compelled to produce a version of the post/ human alongside the human. The human emerges as a historical presence in several dimensions at once, as biblical creatureliness, as consumed spectacle, as philosophical object of inquiry and as part of a zootrope, where humans, plants and animals brush up against one another in the real and symbolic universe. But Figure 2: Leiden anatomical theatre, 1620 (Leiden University Library). Boyle 48 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 46–55 the post/human in this image is non-chronological, and even more convoluted, since it requires attention to the affective presence of a viewer both mediated in and by the image. This is a baroque image. The small dog in the left corner of the image evokes a duration that may overlap with, but is distinctly of a different order than the symbolic time frames within the image. The dog catches us. Looking? Certainly. But also feeling, and not feeling as imagined empathy, but feeling the gap or break between the ‘bornness’ (through death) of the image and the ‘madeness’ of the image. The image is ‘born’ as a moment in time, as an event that signifies the cutting and plotting of knowledge within a narrative and historical scheme (allegorical, biblical and philosophical in the context of the early seventeenth century; emergently ‘modern’ within a contemporary historical context). The image is ‘made’, however, when the small dog looks out to open up the duration of the image. The dog looks at us, and in such a way to ask the questions that the historically born image could not have thought to ask. The dog is set, each time we draw our eyes down to her, to repeat again: ‘What if?’ (see Reynolds, 2003, 4, 120). The dog, then, draws us into an affective hypothetical loop with each passing glance. The ‘What if?’ that is invoked is without question a ‘What if it was you – on the table, with the knife, looking down from above?’ But it is also a ‘What if it was me (the dog)?’ This last subjunctive is a time-image that cuts across historical time, affective time and ethical time. The question of the boundedness and openness of the lines between animal/human/mediation is a question that cannot be answered with conceptual fullness, historically or in the present. An affective dimension emerges with this event, then, that produces an answer not as a conceptual response, but as a being caught up in time, of thinking with and feeling with the image and the unanswerable openness it creates – then and now. This model of time is a kind of transtime, and thus, is moving across, cutting back, toward and forward simultaneously. But this is also trans time to the extent that it is out of sync and out of joint. Valerie Rohy has shown us how the question of historicity itself can be a productive opening to think about what bodies can be thought to be in the present, in the past or to come. In exploring the charge of ‘ahistorical’ reading (levied in this context against queer histories), Rohy examines a moment in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, ‘Ligeia’, that appears to offer up a ‘lesbian effect’ (Rohy, 2006, 63). The queer content in Poe’s story appears years before the mention of female homosexuality in public literature; but, as Rohy stresses, the text’s seeming ‘backward projection of contemporary concerns’ foregrounds anachronism – a queer, out of sync moment, duration, temporality – as its own embodied meaning. As Rohy insists, ‘Poe’s lesbian effect is an optical illusion, visible only from one historical vantage point, but just the same it hangs before our eyes’ (Rohy, 2006, 63). It hangs before our eyes, like the dog’s reiterative glance in the Leiden image, as a sign of what Derrrida has called the ‘the non-contemporaneity of present time with itself’ (quoted in Rohy, 2006, 77). 2 My invocation of the ‘what if?’ here is indebted to Bryan Reynolds’s idea that the ‘common means by which transversal movements occur is through ‘‘subjunctive space’’, the hypothetical space of ‘‘as of’’ and ‘‘what if’’, which is an in-between