The new flesh
Related: flesh - cyber trope - Videodrome (1983) - biohorror - body - David Cronenberg
The concept of New Flesh was baptized as such by David Cronenberg in his movie Videodrome, in 1982, and is present in the rest of his films. The idea is also found in works by other creators like Clive Barker, H. R. Giger, Orlan, Andres Serrano, Charles Burns or Joel Peter-Witkin. [Nov 2006]
"Long live the new flesh" --Videodrome
Definition
The concept of new flesh and the phrase itself was coined by David Cronenberg in the film Videodrome.Biopunk
Biopunk is a sub-genre of science fiction which uses elements from the hard-boiled detective novel, film noir, Japanese anime, and post-modernist prose. It describes the nihilistic, underground side of the biotech society which is said to have started to evolve in the first decade of the 21st century. Unlike cyberpunk, it builds not on information technology but on biology. Individuals are enhanced not by mechanical means, but by human genetic engineering.
One of the prominent writers in this field is Paul Di Filippo, though he called his collection of such stories ribofunk, with the first element being taken from the full name of RNA, ribonucleic acid. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopunk [Nov 2006]
The new flesh and David Cronenberg
David Cronenberg himself will present Spider at the festival and will take part in a discussion about the concept of The New Flesh.It will be followed by a screening of these films:
• Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, 1969)
• Stereo (David Cronenberg, 1970)
• Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1982)
• Cyberman (Peter Lynch, 2001)
• Orlan, Carnal Art (Stephan Oriach, 2001)
Here is the full story:
The concept of New Flesh was baptized as such by David Cronenberg in his movie Videodrome, in 1982, and is present in the rest of his films. The idea is also found in works by other creators like Clive Barker, H. R. Giger, Orlan, Andres Serrano, Charles Burns or Joel Peter-Witkin.--http://plasmapool.esmartweb.com/archive/archive_2002_10.html [Jul 2004]
New Flesh is, in principle, any symbiosis, practice or aesthetics between the human body and another non-organic element. The New Flesh contains an innate component that makes it futuristic. Actually, the concept is born from science fiction with ideas like the cyborg, diligently made real today: considered as extensions of our senses, a car, a cell phone or any kind or radio could be appraised as New Flesh.
The New Flesh is a philosophic-pop concept specially loved by fantasy genre fans. That is why the Sitges International Film Festival of Catalonia announces its dissemination with a cycle of illustrative and revealing movies, co-publishing a collective book with Valdemar that analyzes the subject in all its interpretations, and programming, at the festival, diverse acts including talks and debates with specialist and protagonists.
David Cronenberg: Long Live the New Flesh (1986) - Laurens C. Postma
David Cronenberg: Long Live the New Flesh (1986) is an insightful and entertaining documentary on the films of David Cronenberg. Full of different opinions about what is Cronenberg. Begins discussion on Shivers(1975) and ends with shots of The Fly(1986). Great interviews from Martin Scorsese, Stephen King, and critic Robin Wood. Shows Croenberg as a movie maker that dares to go beyond what is mainstream cinema. --marquis de cinema via imdb.com
Man, Machine
One of the central themes in cyberpunk fiction is established early on by writers like Gibson and Cadigan and by filmmakers like Cronenberg: technology's invasion/replacement of, effect upon, or indistinguishability from the human body. The body, within cyberpunk visions, becomes a physical site for the working out of postmodern conflict and for the speculative mapping of technology. But these conflicts, issues with reproduction (both sexual and mechanical, if there's a difference), and constructions of the body have as much to do with current perception and fears of the body in relation to technology as they do with the future- mapping "speculation" of sci fi.
While the human has often been put in opposition to an alien, (supposedly) distinctly different Other in traditional science fiction, cyberpunk locates the Other in our own technology and promptly threatens the distinction between man and machine in combining or confusing them. The idea of the human body, that of the natural, biological (genetically encoded and unalterable by man), and complete (as in bounded and contained within the limits of the flesh) entity, becomes, within cyberpunk and the works of theorists like Haraway and Bukatman, a fading remnant of Baudrillard's "real." "Implosive science fiction finds the scene of SF problematics not in imperial adventures among the stars, but in the body-physical/body-social and drastic ambivalence about the body's traditional--and terrifyingly uncertain--integrity" (Csicery-Ronay "Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism").
The Natural and the Artificial Misbegotten literally plug into the head of Gina, a human synthesizer. Within the world of "Burning Chrome," Rikki gets blue Ikon implants in the hopes of getting into simstim, Jack has a myoelectric arm, and Bobby "moves" through a computerized matrix of information for a living. Once exposed to Videodrome, Max Renn becomes "video made flesh" and internalizes-- literally, once hallucination is inseparable from reality for him and the viewer -- television signals. Cyborg images merge with, supplement, and change the flesh of the body with man- made hardware, programming, and data. What is human and what is made by humans become indistinguishable, and the uniqueness/irreplaceability of the human being is questionable. How much use is the body without technology? And how "real" is our concept of the body in the first place?
A disturbing factor in the mix of human and machine in cyberpunk is what Csicsery- Ronay, Jr. terms the attack on the "idea of the image of the body" (189). If the body becomes emblematic of what is "natural" and "human," then the entrance of the non-human from outside becomes a threat to the most obvious signifier of what is "human."
As our "fiction" and "theory" show us the cyborg, it is difficult to stop reading and find the "reality." In fact, The "idea of the image of the body," like the Gernsbackian vision of the future peeking through the architecture of gas stations and soda shops, pops up in fiction, advertising, theory, etc., but its reality eludes us. As Donna Haraway would insist, we and our bodies are not untouched in a state of nature: we wear glasses, have pacemakers, rely on computers to do our daily work, wake up to alarm clocks, and communicate by phone and email. The technological, whether it actually invades a specific human body, assists, affects, or even regulates the body's activity. The cyborg, we realize, is not a corrupting of the "real" flesh of the human body, it, like the ideal natural body, is yet another image in a series. "Even while we mistake ourselves for humans, the way we talk shows that we know we're really cyborgs...We're talking about whole new forms of subjectivity here. We're talking seriously mutated worlds that never existed on this planet before. And it's not just ideas. It's new flesh." It's new flesh." --the Wired interview with Donna Haraway The Internal and External Bobby jacks in and rifles through what Gibson calls "mankind's extended electronic nervous system" in "Burning Chrome" ("consensual hallucination" and "data made flesh" in Neuromancer). With the instigation of the Videodrome signal, Renn's incorporation of the technology into his body not only invades his mind; it also gives form to Renn's hallucinations/fantasies (in his own perception of his body and in the recording of those fantasies in the back of Spectacular Optical. Even "The Gernsback Continuum" involves a sort of turning inside out of the body as the narrator begins to see parts of "the mass unconscious." The "inside" of the body, the mind and its perception, are not inviolable within cyberpunk; technology can liberate the mind from the "prison of the flesh," and it can reprogram the body/mind as if it were a computer. Andrew Ross points out in "Hacking Away at Counterculture" that the AIDS virus already does similar work when it invades the body.
Eroticizing the Machine
The ultimate substitution of signs is perhaps the intervention of the technological into sexuality. The machine steps in and enhances (or serves as well as or better than) the body as an object of desire. Renn caresses and sticks his face in an undulating television, and Gina wonders if being forced into sinning can be considered rape if she knows she's going to like it. In addition to the obvious comparisons to the sexual act and its pleasure when Bobby "jacks in," Rikki comes on to Jack by beginning to stroke his electric arm.
Is man any different from a machine?
Ultimately, cyberpunk treats technology and its invasion of the body with a mixture of fear and awe: even as it promises to bring new power, capability, pleasure, longevity to (or freedom from) the body, it threatens to make the body, as well as the body's connection to "nature," obsolete. If our images of the body, within the whole of culture or specifically within cyberpunk fiction, are a sort of social mapping of identity, then what constitues the real of the body? Can our notions of what is unique and natural, in terms of bodies and desire from and for them, stand up to postmodern theory and the cyberpunk movement? If we lift the map, is there anything underneath?
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