061

Authors:

 Dyens, Olliver

Title:

 The Rise of the Culture Body

Keywords:

 biology, culture, technology, representation, evolution

Abstract:

 The body is a new world… The body is becoming a space unto which biological and technological phenomena converge. The body is becoming a strange accumulation of ideas, genes, metal, and software, a pool of biological and computerized viruses, and a vector of representations and diseases. The body is becoming a cultural organism. All around us the environment is saturated with living organisms made of signs, of ideas, and of intelligence, bodies made of commercials, of information, of theories.Organic life is being overtaken by cultural life. Culture is everywhere, in every manifestations of life. All around us, living beings are now rising through the cultural realm rather than through the organic one. Already the map of the human genome suggests the body can be a canvass on which society will read, write and draw. Clones, transgenic pigs, manipulated farm animals, septuplets, headless tadpoles, victims of organ traffic, all of these are examples of the body as a cultural organism. We are becoming media-bodies, image-bodies, intelligence-bodies. We are becoming culture-bodies. But how is this possible? Life is not committed to organic matter. Life is opportunistic because it has only one objective: its multiplication. As far as the dynamics of life are concerned, we, living beings, are inefficient entities made of slow and fragile organic material. Cultural systems, on the other hand, are much more efficient. So with today's cultural systems and material readily available, life will tend to use cultural over organic material to spread and disseminate. Life will not disappear, but less and less of it will take place in organic environments, within organic bodies. The phenomenon we call beauty is a perfect example of how culture is now deeply affecting biology. We no longer are excited by organic clues into how healthy a body is, because these clues can easily be manipulated. What sexually arouses us nowadays, is how culturally saturated, how culturally fertile a body is. Today, efficient bodies are healthy and fertile cultural bodies. What sexually attracts us to Pamela Anderson for example is not the equilibrium between immunity and fertility that her body represents, but rather the fact that her body is much less biological than it is cultural. Pamela Anderson is attractive because her cultural body is extremely efficient and fertile. Beauty is not anchored to biology anymore. What sexually arouse us nowadays are not signs of biological health. Rather, we now desperately search for signs of cultural strength, cultural presence and cultural fertility. We are entering an era of strange miracles, an era where we ourselves will be both beautiful and frightening. Our "ontology " will become essentially cultural, assemblage of signs, skin and machines free from the earth's biological gravity. Our biological reality is becoming a bio-cultural reality. We are entities made of organic culture.
Dyens, Olliver. odyens@hotmail.com Ollivier Dyens is from Montreal. From 1993-1998 he taught in the Department of French Studies at Sainte-Anne University in Nova-Scotia, Canada. Since August 98, Department of French and Italian at Louisiana State University. Published many poems in different magazines. Created and edited a literary magazine "Feux chalins". Produced short films and created a collection of digital artwork.