The Skin of Perception
Phenomenology as a Cartesian Proposition
by Mark Daniel Cohen
Current Venues:
South Street Seaport Exhibition Centre, New York
Auditorio de Medicina del ITESM, Hospital San José, Monterrey, Mexico
The Shops at Sunset Place, Miami, through Mar 25, 2007
800 Pike St., Seattle, through Mar 31, 2007
Beurs van Berlage Concert and Conference Hall, Amsterdam, through Apr 14, 2007
(Note: Not all venues list closing dates.)
To download the entire essay as Adobe PDF format |
| right click the link “The Skin of Perception: Phenomenology as a Cartesian Proposition.” Select “save target as” to save to your PC.
Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2006. Copyright © 2006 Mark Daniel Cohen and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
Page I
Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery.
—Paul Valéry
Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures under ground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.
—T. S. Eliot, “Whispers of Immortality”
When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about.
—Albert Einstein
Our destruction, if we bring it, will not be indefinite. It will be a definite thing indeed, and in deed. Decimation cannot be minced by the power of undecidability, not when it is the house of undecidability that will be decimated. As we ensconce ourselves in ruminations on the undecidable nature of speculation and encounter, as we amuse ourselves by focusing our thoughts on the ever-retreating objective of indeterminate specification draping all we can know and all we can experience, all that is phenomenal, in a shroud of indistinction and pride ourselves on our inability to hold back the tide of deconstruction from anything it is possible for us to know, we find ourselves in a place of growing absolutes. The shadows are gathering all around us and pool into a darkness that is inescapable—the absolute of eventuality. What we are about to do to ourselves falls outside the perimeters of what is in our power to control. If there is an undecidability, it is our inability to decide, for our thoughts are bringing us death, and it appears there is nothing we can do about them.
In his essay “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” Nietzsche warned us of the time in the life of the mind in which we live. The will falters with the awareness of history; it folds with the glance in the mirror, with the sense of the self as actor—it is subject to the law of Hamlet, doomed to the fate of Macbeth. We live in an awareness of history unfolding, for history has come to consume the present as well as the past. We see ourselves as agents in a story, even as we act as agents in the story. As Sontag wrote in the beginning of “ ‘Thinking Against Oneself’: Reflections on Cioran” (in which, in an act of audacious phrasal synonymy, she virtually rewrites the opening section of Nietzsche’s essay), “The human mind possesses now, almost as second nature, a perspective on its own achievements that fatally undermines their value and their claim to truth. For over a century, this historicizing perspective has occupied the very heart of our ability to understand anything at all. Perhaps once a marginal tic of consciousness, it’s now a gigantic, uncontrollable gesture—the gesture whereby man indefatigably patronizes himself.”
The intrepid risk of “the historicizing perspective,” committed as an intellectual “gesture,” is getting behind the curve, and that intrepidity is now harrowing. We are entering a fresh historical period: the era of universal nuclear capability, if it can maintain itself long enough to become an “era.” Given that there seems to be nothing that will withhold it, functionally, meaningfully, we are already there. And we have come to no pertinent determinations of what we will do about it, of how we will survive it. With every statement by a public official or political commentator concerning the number of years necessary for Iran to complete its nuclear program or for North Korea to build a rocket able to reach the contiguous states, we demonstrate our failure to comprehend just where we are. What matters is not the lead-time but the inevitability. It is as good as done. And we have thought of no answers.
And more is coming, for we have invented far more than nuclear power. Our risks are the results of the achievements of our minds, and our failures are the results of the shortcomings of our ability to think. As our technological ingenuities proliferate, the power of decimation disseminates. Increasing degrees of damage can be done by groups of diminishing size, and so by increasing numbers of people, and eventually it will be possible for any one person to destroy every last person. The lead-time does not matter—functionally we are there now. It would be unwise to suggest scenarios, but one need only look at several recent films to construe a sense of the general possibilities: The Peacemaker, The Siege, Outbreak, 12 Monkeys.
And so, as is always the case, we are always thinking about the wrong thing, and in the wrong way. We all cut our teeth on the self-enveloping intricacies of deconstructive principles, of the protocols of ineradicable indetermination, of the implausibility of absolutes of any species, and if we do nothing wise, and if we do not do it shortly, our fate will be soon be decided absolutely. For the first time in history, we have the capability of destroying ourselves utterly. And at just the right moment, we have devised the incapability to see such a thing is possible. We have surreptitiously postulated our own immortality, for we have become incapable of conceiving of our thorough, universal demise. The timing is perfect.
| page up |
But we should know this, for it is by principle that we are always thinking wrong. If we recognize the broad applicability of the distinctly Heraclitean proposition of the enantiodromia of C. G. Jung (and a solid Nietzschean he), a proposition it appears more broadly applicable than even Jung thought, we should recognize that a time in which we are absorbed by the cutting-edge theorizations of indeterminacy must be a time in which adamantine implications are facing us, a time in which we confront eventualities that, once occasioned, cannot be corrected. Our thoughts convey by their “gestures” precisely the opposite of what they say—this is our nature, at least, our nature when we gather together in sufficient numbers and then attempt to think. For we should know that when enough people agree, the idea must be wrong. An individual may be possessed of insight; a congregation will delude itself. This is the true implication of the herd instinct—when the euphuism of the time leans to fathomless degrees of intricacy, a stark fate is looming.
And it is not a faltering of the will that is the issue at hand, for it is not that we cannot act, but that we do not see. The face in the mirror does not mesmerize; it obscures. We know not where we are; we know not what we do; we know not what we think, for there are structural patterns in thought that preclude our grasping our dilemmas, that put us at the mercy of ourselves.
For there is a gulf, there is a gap in the seal of perception. As much as our awareness of the world is determined by the laws that pertain to the epistemological conditions of knowing, as much as laws of thought rule the manner in which we may know and the decisions we may think to enact—knowledge and decisions that may well be capable of infinite parsing, of interminable splitting into ever subtler shades of indistinction, that may well refer to phenomena of ultimately indecipherable aspect—we commit actions that occur not among phenomena but in the world, that are as real as is the world without the range of our perceptions, and whose ramifications obey the laws not of thought but of objective reality, of physics: that are not implications but eventualities. For we are minds, but we are as well bodies, objects in a world of objective facts—facts among an ocean of facts. If the world is beyond our capacity to know with perfectly defined accuracy, with precision, so are our bodies, so are we, and so are the actions we devote. If our knowledge cannot be perfect, then our knowledge of ourselves must be imperfect, for we are, in the end and as Nietzsche knew so well, each of us a piece of nature. And unless we are incapable of surprise, unless we are competent to live through only what we can conceive, we will do to ourselves what we cannot predict. However uncertain our knowledge is, we are bodies and subject to absolutes, for as physical realities, the surest thing we are capable of is death, and death cannot be diced.
For finally, we live and, ultimately, we die not in the “world” we perceive but in the world, and the world has the power to eradicate phenomena—to eviscerate our minds of every perception and thought, to extirpate our minds themselves—not just the phenomena of decimation but the very potency of conceiving phenomena itself. The world is apart from our power to encounter it, for the world will remain when we have erased ourselves from it. The scorched earth will be left behind when we all are gone, and the power that will flame it to a cinder is found at a level of magnification beyond the range of our senses, outside the precincts of the phenomenal. We will call down the thunder from a source we cannot conceive, but it will come as a result of what we will have created.
Such thoughts enter the mind when viewing “BODIES... The Exhibition,” not merely because the exhibition space is filled with what seem to be, and essentially are, coagulated renditions of what we are about to turn ourselves into, but because the experience of observing the quasi-scientific specimens of human remains itself invokes a pointed instance of the essential anomaly of our position as creatures of the world and as knowers of the world, as those who know ourselves as particles of the earth no better than we know the world of which we are fragments.
The exhibition in New York is only one installment of an enterprise of entertainment presentations—not quite art exhibitions and not quite science museum shows—continuing to arrive in a series of cities around the world. “BODIES... The Exhibition,” as seen in New York, presents 22 whole-body human specimens and 260 organ and partial body specimens preserved through the use of liquid silicone rubber.
The technique involves the dissection of human bodies to expose inner structures and the substitution of the bodies’ water with a liquid silicone mixture that hardens to transform the remains into permanently preserved specimens with the texture of rubber and the appearance of the originals, meaning the appearance of authentic cadavers, which these apparently are, in that the original tissues evidently are transformed but not removed. The body parts are displayed with palpable sobriety, and the full-body specimens are opened to reveal muscles and organs and are posed: running with muscles streaming off in the seeming breeze, sitting in the posture of Rodin’s Thinker, playing football, and committing other such pantomimed antics. *
For those who will not make it to any of the venues: The alter-ego version of the New York exhibition (refer to the note at the end of this text) serves as one of the sets in Casino Royale, providing a reasonably clever reflection of the biological Calvinism that establishes the underlying value system for the Bond stories and that hasn’t been seen in the film series since the middle of Thunderball.
There have been expressions of shock and outrage over the exhibitions. Directors of the Seattle Museum of the Mysteries issued a statement declaring the exhibition demonstrates “a gross disrespect for the dead” and labeling it “a violation of basic human rights and dignity.” In England, Tory MP Teddy Taylor remarked, “This will only appeal to ghoulish groups in our society. What possible benefit can a normal person gain from looking at dead bodies?” Also in England, a spokesperson for the Nuffield Foundation, a charitable trust in the United Kingdom, announced, “Human tissue should not be bought and sold or otherwise treated as an object of commerce. Body parts, anatomical specimens or preserved bodies should not be displayed in connection with public entertainment or art.” A spokesperson for the British Medical Association said, “We feel uncomfortable with the money aspect of it.” In Austria, the Dean of Mannheim objected that the exhibitions violate the sanctity of the human body for the purposes of commercial art. And from the art contingent, there has been little support forthcoming—David Lee, editor of The Jackdaw, an English newsletter on the visual arts, stated, “I will go and thousands of others will go too. But in the end it is a freak show.”
It is notable that none of the objections quoted here, nor those observed by this writer elsewhere, give reasons for the outrage. The ghastliness is taken to be self-evident, which is to say that the arguments are made by fiat—without reasoning. Yet, there does seem to be something if not reasonable then at least predictable about such expressions of dismay. It seems as if one should not be surprised by them—it seems sensible that one would be shocked by this visual material, even if one cannot specify what there is in it that is shocking. There is the suggestion of something purely reactive here, something deeply rooted and not deliberate. And it is as in all things, the reactive is a mental lock, a willfulness not to think, a willfulness not to see. It is the vacuum gap of the mind.
So the question establishes itself: What about the viewing of preserved human corpses is shocking, shocking in a way that the viewing of manufactured models of the same structures would not be?
It is clear at the first degree of consideration that these specimens invoke in the thoughts the mind / body dichotomy—they are virtually, in perhaps a reverse application of the contemporary meaning of the word and reflective of the near ambulatory postures into which the complete bodies have been maneuvered, a dramatization of the essential dilemma. As the chafing reactions make equally evident, a certain position with regard to the mind / body dichotomy is necessary to our equilibrium. The stability of the equation with which the two concepts are contemplated determines our stability in contemplating them—if the balance of halves is recalibrated, the balance of large numbers of people is disturbed. A nerve is being touched, which is to say a need is being disdained.
| page up |
Continue| Reading | Page II