Momus
The Herald Scotgeist Column
April 1998
Story Of An Eye

On December 14th 1997 I woke up with a droopy, red right eye. At first it looked like conjunctivitis, but a month later specialists diagnosed it as a rare amoebal infestation, acanthamoeba keratitis, which infects about forty people a year. The amoebas, stubborn little monocellular organisms without brains, get in when you scuff the surface of the eye with a dirty soft contact lens. Once they're in, it's very, very difficult to get rid of them, and the longer they live on your cornea, the more damage they do.

I started a treatment of cold drops, but the eye got worse and soon the doctors were telling me that I might lose vision on the right side altogether. I was hospitalised and put on heavy doses of steroids to quell the raging inflammation. So far nothing is working, and it looks as if I'm going to be struggling with these wretched amoebas for some time, wearing a ludicrous black eyepatch and waiting for the doctors to decide whether the scarring on my eye warrants a corneal graft -- the replacement of my own eye-surface with the cornea of a dead person.

Lying in hospital contemplating partial blindness, I started thinking in a new way about a trendy subject: prosthetics.

Prostheses are any additions or alterations we make to our own bodies. As a short-sighted person I started off using a prosthetic device invented in 1268: spectacles. It took myopic mankind 700 years to progress from a sturdy external device to a floppy, semi-internal device: disposable contact lenses.

I got my first pair in 1988, partly because I was going out with a beautiful girl and wanted to be able to watch her getting dressed in the morning. The lens, by now gossamer-thin, damp and floppy, got closer to my eye, resting against it. Soft contact lenses are able to lie against such a sensitive organ as the eye because they mimic the body's own soft biological machinery. But they are still foreign objects, still products of culture, not nature. With the promise of a merging of technology and flesh comes the threat of more insidious corruption.

A Whiff Of The Borg

I'm a tech enthusiast, and even though soft contact lenses have messed me up, I haven't lost my faith in cultural solutions to biological problems. We're entering a century in which the most incredible alterations will be made to the human body, in which we will become mingled with machines and with other species, and in which all the parameters of our specification will be rejiggable. Call it the era of the Post-Human or call it the Prosthetic Century, I challenge you to come back in fifty years and separate what is natural and cultural, what is biological and what technological, in the average human being. Sartre's existentialist dictum that 'man is the animal who makes his own nature' will be true in a new, very literal way. We will all have a whiff of the borg, the replicant, the terminator about us.

So I ask myself, if I do lose my eye, will I be able to get a tiny video camera inserted that can interface directly with my brain? I'd be happy to try, just as I'd like a reliable database of names and addresses and phone numbers stuck in my brain on a microchip to enhance my useless memory. (And while you're in there, why not add some face recognition software and voice-activated simultaneous language translation?)

Digital Flesh

The philosophers Arthur and Marilouise Kroker call it Digital Flesh. 'We are perhaps the last of the human species born without data skin or cyberorgans,' they say.

Just as, when Hamlet made his renaissance humanist speech about 'What a piece of work is Man...' he ended the soliloquy telling us how awful he felt personally, the Krokers believe that the '90s are a confused time where theory and practice aren't really meshing. Having lost our sense of what the body really is, or where it is, we have embarked on a series of reconstructions of some nostalgic sense of the 'pure body' equipped with an electronic repertoire of 'improved emergent senses'.

And, damn it, they're right. My fluorescent yellow bag contains a digital still camera, digital video camera, portable internet-capable phone, not to mention a little graveyard of dead tamagotchis and a transparent Gameboy. When I get home the first thing I do is tell my Mac what kind of day I've had by transferring my digital stills onto its hard disk, then letting it catalogue the E mail I've already read on the road.

Plato's Cave

People occasionally object that my attention is split, that I'm living in a Plato's cave of shadows and appearances. I readily agree, but trace the problem back to the invention of language, the first and still the most pervasive technology for alienating us from our direct sensual experience. And then I point out that without this alienation from what's in front of us we can't share things, and we can't change things.

You can't univent language, and, much as some hippies would like to, you can't really regress to some primal, animal way of seeing. At best you become Kaspar Hauser, the wolf boy. It's lonely being an animal, without media, without communication.

I've always had this rather anal, Calvinist thing about collating and stocking my experiences -- it used to be diaries, or the black and white photos I'd develop myself in a blacked out bathroom. But no matter how private those diaries were, the ultimate ambition was to share my experience in a way that went beyond small talk. And I wanted, by mapping myself, to change myself.

Experience-storing gadgets like camcorders are extensions of our sense organs and our memory. Once, like me, you've got into the habit of taking them with you in a bag wherever you go, it's a small step to start thinking about incorporating them in your clothes. And soon the gadgets make the same leap that spectacles did when they turned into lenses, and begin to slip under your skin, becoming transplants and inserts.

Cut, Copy, Paste

When I got my first word processor in 1986, the discovery that you could edit text so easily, dragging about blocks on the screen, not only changed the way I wrote, it also made the whole world seem refreshingly changeable. When I started dabbling with Photoshop in 1993 a similar thing happened with the visual world. Computers made me realise the importance of the edit, and the arbitrariness of the real. Once you've rearranged your face with Kai's Power Tools or Power Goo, it's not such a big leap to making some of the more successful changes permanent with surgery.

Once terrified of dentists, I began in the late 80s to frequent a certain cosmetic dentist on the King's Road. Dentics, which feels more like a duty free shop or an amusement arcade than a traditional dentist's surgery, features a computer which superimposes the results of various treatments on a photo of your own teeth and face.

Once you've sorted out the aesthetics in the digital domain the pain doesn't feel too bad.

The progression from spectacles to contact lenses took seven hundred years, but I think digital prostheses will be under our skin in about seven. Things are moving on all fronts so fast that I don't dare to guess whether I will, in 2010, be sporting a cloned biological eye or some sort of soft-mechanical video eye. It's perfectly possible that I'll be experiencing an even worse dystopian techno-nightmare than the one contact lenses have plunged me into, with my TV eye on the blink and an unstoppable stream of electrons being pumped directly to my sight-reception ganglions, causing some roaring new form of white noise migraine.

Such are the risks run by enthusiasts, lab monkeys and early adopters.

Salute The Pioneers!

I'm more upbeat about all this than the pessimistic Krokers. I think we're resolving the confusion. Digital edits were the theory, but as we get bolder, flesh edits will become the practice. And we won't always be editing in the direction of whiter, straighter teeth and less crooked noses, the conformist reflex towards nostalgia and the normative.

We who believe in the future, in liberty and diversity and the ultimate, inevitable eradication of the line between culture and nature, should stop to salute certain shape-changing pioneers who have dared to evolve themselves in much more interesting, even downright freakish directions.

Orlan is an artist, a woman in her fifties, who lives in Paris. I met her in 1996 at FIAC, a big art fair. I had just been watching a video of one of her cosmetic surgery operations. Most people have cosmetic surgery to get their irregularities straightened out. Orlan does it to show our Ovidian potential to change shape indefinitely, just for the heady sense of freedom it gives us. She has had little horn-like bumps built on her forehead, and her face has been restructured so many times she must get an interesting surprise every time she looks in the mirror. Shortly after watching the video I met Orlan strolling the aisles of the exhibition hall with her daughter, a (presumably) natural beauty in her 20s. Trying not to stare at her horns, I gave her mother a copy of one of my records. She said she might use it as the soundtrack to one of her operation videos. I told her nothing would please me more.

Leigh Bowery was the club entrepreneur and body artist who died of AIDS in 1996. A blobby misfit since his youth in Australia, he turned his self-consciousness about his own body into an obsessive search for extreme new forms, endlessly knocking up new outfits which made him resemble some outlandish walking Joan Miro sculpture or a genetic collision between Beau Brummell and a b-movie space monster. (Sue Tilley's biography was one of last year's most interesting reads).

Michael Jackson is also an important precursor of the Prosthetic Age, the ultimate Nietzschean self-made hero who has transcended race and gender and age, making himself his own Pygmalion and his own Frankenstein's monster.

Dr Stephen Hawking has to feature in the list, especially as portrayed in the Jake and Dinos Chapman sculpture of him entitled 'Ubermensch'.

And we mustn't forget that '70s prosthetic swinger, Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man.

I don't deny there is something tragic in all these examples. In an age which fetishises the phantasm of Normality as much as ours does, these pioneers are sure to be pitied and derided by a conservative public secretly fascinated by them.

Against Nature

It would be nice to think we lived in an experimental society where people really were taking these paths in the same spirit as the chameleon rock stars of the 1970s, changing their faces and their images with each album, writing under the influence of chemicals and cutting up their lyrics like Burroughs and Gyson, just to stay fresh and interesting. It would be nice to think that for artistic reasons we were all turning into Des Esseintes, the defiantly artificial dandy hero of Huysmans' fin de si�cle novel 'Against Nature'.

But mostly, science is ahead of our desire to change. We turn to it not as a fascinating new toy, but as a pain-killer, a last resort when the comforts of conformism and normality are no longer available to us. It's more likely to be the social exclusion felt by the great mis-shapen that pushes us to contemplate experimenting with the body-altering technologies that are now becoming available. Just as prosthetic legs are the result of the landmines laid during painful third world civil wars, so prosthetic bodies can start with ruthlessly normal kids taunting a fat boy in an Australian school playground.

If that's the motor of progress, so be it. No pain, no gain.

No More 'Normal Only More So'!

But, sitting here in my eye-patch, I personally hope that the Prosthetic Age will be a lot more than Arnold Schwarzenegger and Pamela Anderson duetting, in the soundtrack to some Post Human blockbuster, 'Thanks for the mammaries... and the memories!' We need to get beyond this paradox of the super-normal, this normal-only-more-so thing of bigger muscles and bigger boobs.

When I get that replacement eye, it's going to look a lot more interesting, and do a lot more things, than the one I lost.

Maybe I'll get them to put it on the back of my head so I can watch the twentieth century slipping away.