BODIES AND TECHNOLOGIES: _DORA_, _NEUROMANCER_, AND
STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE
by
WENDY WAHL
Department of English
University of Vermont
w_wahl@uvmvax.bitnet
_Postmodern Culture_ v.3 n.2 (January, 1993)
Copyright (c) 1993 by Wendy Wahl, all rights
reserved. This text may be freely shared among
individuals, but it may not be republished in any
medium without express written consent from the
author and advance notification of the editors.
[1] High technology networks make possible the deluge of
texts surrounding us. We swim in the flow of information,
and are provided with (or drowned within) interpretations
and representations. High technology has changed the way
capital functions, and makes possible the electronic format
of this journal. A new relationship between bodies and
technologies is, seemingly, unprecedented in modern
capitalism. Donna Haraway, in her "Manifesto for Cyborgs"
(1985), writes of a post-natural present in which "Late
twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous
the difference between natural and artificial, mind and
body, self-developing and externally designed, and many
other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and
machines. Our machines are frighteningly lively, and we
ourselves frighteningly inert" (152).
[2] After all, the human capacity to generate or make sense
of information has been surpassed by computers, and
challenged by the deluge of texts (literal, aural, visual)
that surround us. Baudrillard's response to this deluge is
triggered by a quick spin of the radio dial: "I no longer
succeed in knowing what I want, the space is so saturated,
the pressure so great from all who want to make themselves
heard" (132).
[3] Theorists from many disciplines are engaged in the
process of articulating the function and effects of high
technology; many have argued, as Baudrillard has, that the
human condition has been transformed by the encounter with
the unique and unprecedented power of high technology.
Assuming a material uniqueness in the encounter with high
technology is dangerous; this assumption obviates important
precedents that may help us to strategize some resistance to
a "gradual and willing accommodation of the machine"
(Gibson, 203). Freud's clinical methods, and his
construction of the relationship between patient and
therapist, for example, are strikingly similar to the
current encounter between bodies and technologies. A look
at Freud's account of his treatment of Dora makes obvious
this decidedly low-tech version of a "deluge of texts," and
shows the way in which this therapeutic construct
incorporated resistance. What are the possibilities for
resistance to this new deluge? This question has provided
the impetus for a vital, and absolutely necessary,
discussion of strategies. As I will show in this essay,
these responses are symptomatic of the failure of resistance
to technologies of the early twentieth century. Strategies
of resistance are often incorporated into systems,
strengthening that which is being resisted. Juliet Mitchell
has described the function of this resisting space:
"[Resistance] is set up precisely as its own ludic space,
its own area of imaginary alternative, but not as a symbolic
alternative. It is not that the carnival cannot be
disruptive of the law, but it disrupts only within terms of
that law" (Mitchell, 1982).
[4] I hope to provide some strategies, and historical
warnings, that may help one actualize and resist power at a
time when the possibility of doing so seems dismal. Haraway
reminds us, with hope and pragmatism, that "we are not
dealing with technological determinism, but with a
historical system depending upon structured relations among
people" (165). This "historical system" includes the
interaction between bodies and technologies and the
implications of these encounters, which are referred to in
this essay as "cyborg politics." The origin of cyborg
politics doesn't begin with the late twentieth century,
however, but with the broad tradition of positing scientific
and technical solutions to free humans from pain and to
solve problems of the human condition, particularly problems
that originate not with the machine or technology, but
within the body. Foucault has given us a description of the
emergence of bio-technical power in the seventeenth century;
his description of this power maps onto our twentieth-
century concern with bodies and technologies:
Discipline may be identified neither with an
institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of
power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole
set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of
application, targets; it is a "physics" or an "anatomy"
of power, a technology. (206)
[5] Within an early twentieth-century Foucaultian
formation, Freud emerges as the mental technologist and
industrialist, producing the truth of mind and body within
the critical tools of psychotherapy. Freud constructed a
method whereby the mind, largely abandoned to the world of
religious therapies, was treated by empiricists, and built
upon the work of the psychiatrists of the French school:
Charcot, Georget, and Pinel (Goldstein, 134-166).
[6] Psychotherapy was a new disciplinary technology, unique
unto science because it treated the mind as a machine (a
method previously visited upon the body). Freud ushered in
the Western twentieth century with this industrialist
approach to the soul, fracturing the inner self in two:
"conscious" and "unconscious" drives. Within this new
science, and in Freud's clinical approach, the Cartesian
dualism of mind/body breaks down: "mind" has been divided
into conscious/unconscious. As a result, "mind" is no
longer one unitary term that can correspond to its binary
opposite, "body." This disruption could be promising:
mind/body corresponded to male/female, and it would seem
that this pair of binary oppositions would no longer be able
to function with respect to gender. Yet this deconstruction
of oppositional pairs serves to strengthen others, and
raises some thorny questions for Freud's treatment of Dora.
[7] What, then, becomes of the relationship between mind
and body within the Freudian construct? If there is a
disruption of the mind/body dualism when the "mind" has been
fractured into two distinct entities, how does this affect
clinical practice? Freud changed these pairs or, at the
least, expanded the way they function: the patient's
experiences, as described by the patient, were informed by
the unconscious mind in a way that was not evident to the
patient. In deconstructing the mind/body separation, Freud
constructed a new oppositional pair in its place, that of
the conscious/unconscious. The relations between the
conscious mind and body were obvious to the patient, but
those were less important for fixing the machine than was
the relationship between the unconscious mind and body. If
this relationship was the arbiter of the body's functions
and of the conscious mind, how could one go about fixing it?
One couldn't; a therapist had to be called in for repair.
The "unconscious" drives were given over to the
interpretation of the therapist. In treating the machinery
of the mind, Freudian therapists were given the interpretive
duty of constructing desire and representing the inner self.
Philip Reiff, in his introduction to _Dora_, captures the
perfect circularity of Freudian psychotherapy as enacted in
clinical practice:
By presuming the patient incapable of an impartial
judgment, the therapist is empowered to disregard the
patient's denials.... A patient says: "You may think I
meant to say something insulting but I've no such
intention. . . . From this the analyst may conclude,
"So, she does mean to say something insulting...." (15)
[8] It is also evident in Reiff's description that
resistance against a therapist is incorporated, and
neutralized, within therapy. The Freudian therapeutic
situation is a cybernetic network in which resistance
functions to support the system. It is in this clinical
practice that any potential disruption of dualisms promised
in Freudian theory were recuperated. That Freud has
constructed an impenetrable defense for the therapist is
obvious. In retrospect, it's easy (albeit reductive) to
view Freud's incorporation of resistance into therapies (as
a prerequisite for therapy) as a frustrated empiricist's
attempt to fit the mind into the structure of empiricism.
[9] The patient/therapist opposition was constructed in
place of the mind/body opposition, and re-enacted as
male/female. Perhaps Freud's construction of an
impenetrable position for therapists, and an utterly
penetrated position for patients, created a backlash against
the material moment when male/female became disengaged from
mind/body. At any rate, the context is utterly changed for
a patient of psychotherapy. The beginnings of an answer to
the question of gender difference in the therapist/patient
relationship lie in asking the following question: Who is
treated and why? Men were rarely caught on the "penetrated"
side of the therapist/patient relationship. Although
male/female no longer enacted mind/body, another structure
excluded men from needing this interpretive therapy: the
impetus for treatment is resistance on the part of the
patient. Philip Reiff characterized the category of patient
in his introduction to _Dora_ when he wrote that, "the
neurotic makes too many rejections" (16).
[10] Although men were no longer excluded from the category
of patient, having unconscious drives themselves, the
prerequisite for treatment was often hysteria or neurosis.
Hysteria was a term used to categorize actions seen,
historically, as being particular to women, although Freud
and the Paris school's characterization of hysteria did not
expressly exclude men. Jan Goldstein has documented that
hysteria was flirted with by most of the nineteenth-century
French male novelists, and she argues that the literary
interest in such a disease "included as one of its
components a fascination with this 'otherness,' a tendency
to recognize in it aspects of the self and to enlist it in
the service of self-discovery" (138). Goldstein's theory
would also explain why Flaubert never entered into therapy,
despite identifying himself as an hysteric. In his fiction,
Flaubert wrote of hysteria only through female characters,
as did all the other French novelists mentioned in
Goldstein's essay.
[11] Dora's treatment, after all, was not in the interest
of self-discovery, but in the interest of her father. Dora
had been brought to Freud in an effort to get Dora to accept
her father's affair with Frau K. The father also needed
Dora to respond to Herr K so that he could get his game of
partner-swapping to continue to go smoothly: he attempts to
swap "partners" with Herr K by offering his daughter, Dora,
to Herr K, in exchange for Herr K's wife. This play of
substitutions, begun by the father, certainly asks to be
seen as a machine. This is a desiring machine in which
substitutions can be made: there are slots to be filled (so
to speak) that eclipse an individual desire to be in that
position. This is particularly true in Dora's case. When
Dora was put into treatment, Freud writes that "[s]he
objected to being pulled into the game entirely, at the same
time she was fascinated by it and wanted to play" (34). By
the time treatment had begun, Dora was suicidal, and had
been resisting Herr K.'s advances, the first of which
occurred when she was 14 years old. "He suddenly clasped
the girl to him and pressed a kiss upon her lips. This was
surely just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of
sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen who had never before
been approached. But Dora had at that moment a violent
feeling of disgust and tore herself free from the man . . ."
(43).
[12] Freud writes that "the behavior of this child of
fourteen was already entirely and completely hysterical"
because she did not have the "genital sensation which would
have certainly been felt by a healthy girl in such
circumstances" (44). Dora's resistance to Herr K.'s
advances provided Freud with the cornerstone of the
psychology of the neuroses: reversal of affect. Without
Dora's bodily resistance to Herr K., Freud would never have
been able to treat her in the first place. Without Dora's
repeated verbal resistance to Freud's suppositions, he
couldn't have written in the "repressed" desires for nearly
everyone in the "game."
[13] Interestingly enough, in his interpretation of
Schreber's _Memoirs of My Nervous Illness_, Freud didn't
perceive any indications that this approach could inhibit
treatment by negating the patient's interpretations.
Freud's textual analysis of the _Memoirs_, titled
"Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a
Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)", ignores the
obvious: Schreber is able to treat himself via his own
process of writing and interpretation.
[14] Schreber writes of his "gratitude" toward Professor
Fleschig, his doctor, for helping Scheber to recover, but in
a manner "so hedged with doubts and reservations that it
subverts the expressed appreciation" (Chabot, 16). Schreber
doesn't give credit for his recovery to the doctor who was
in charge of his treatment, and blames this on the doctor's
inability to recognize his patient as "a human being of high
intellect, of uncommon keenness of understanding and acute
powers of observation" (_Memoirs_, 62). What does this tell
us about Freud's understanding of Schreber's treatment?
Freud didn't extrapolate Schreber's therapeutic process to
his own clinical method; he ignores that Schreber's
experience points to the healing power of a patient's
interpretation. The patient's story, moreover, must not be
systematically negated, as in the treatment of Dora.
[15] C. Barry Chabot examines these texts in his book
_Freud on Schreber_, and writes that "Schreber's
understanding of his experiences . . . evolved with his
progress on the manuscript: the act of writing was for him
an act of revision"; "[m]oreover, writing his memoirs, an
act that . . . played a role in [Schreber's] eventual
release from Sonnenstein, was itself restorative" (7).
Schreber produced texts, as Freud did. Schreber's ability
to heal himself is evinced in the act of writing his
_Memoirs_: Schreber's "revision" and interpretation of his
own experience is the therapeutic process by which he heals
himself. Chabot makes a compelling case for the clinical
and literary interpretations as being intertwined, such is
"the nature of the interpretive process, be it literary or
clinical" (11).
[16] It can be argued that Dora does produce her own
narrative, but this is used by and subsumed within Freud's
interpretation in clinical practice and, more permanently,
within Freud's written texts. Schreber's interpretation
existed outside of the formal or institutional therapy he
received. Freud's textual analysis of Schreber's memoirs
was just that: a textual exploration outside of clinical
contact with the patient; as such, Freud's analysis never
affected Schreber. In Freudian clinical practice, the
interpretive process that Schreber used to successfully
treat himself would have been used against him by the
therapist. Reiff writes that Freud "speaks of using facts
against the patient and reports, with some show of triumph
(this is no mean adversary), how he overwhelmed Dora with
interpretations, pounding away at her argument, until
Dora...'disputed the facts no longer.' Yet these facts were
none of them visible; they were all of them of the highest
order, taking their life from the precise truth of Freud's
multiple analytic thrusts into her unconscious" (16).
[17] The act of interpretation was the province of the
therapist alone, and was used to engulf the patient with
"indisputable facts." These critics continue to argue for a
material uniqueness in the encounter with high technology,
yet the "invisible facts" referred to by Reiff could easily
characterize Baudrillard's vision of the late twentieth
century: "In any case, we will have to suffer this new state
of things, this forced extension of all interiority, this
forced injection of all exteriority that the categorical
imperative of communication literally signifies" (132).
This "forced injection" into Baudrillard's as-yet-
unpenetrated interior mimics Freud's act of "pounding away"
at Dora with his interpretations. Baudrillard's profile of
the new subject, assaulted on all sides by "those who want
to make themselves heard" doubles for the Freudian patient:
"He is now a pure screen, a switching center for all the
networks of influence" (133). What Baudrillard can't
accept, obviously, are the multiple "thrusts" into his
neutral terminal. Using theory to play with the loss of his
private past and with the disruption of his position as
subject, Baudrillard recalls Flaubert's flirtation with
hysteria.
[18] Fredric Jameson's response to the problem of
subjectivity also evokes the nineteenth-century French
novelists; he writes that "only by means of a violent formal
and narrative dislocation could a narrative apparatus come
into being capable of restoring life and feeling to this
only intermittently functioning organ which is our capacity
to organize and live time historically" (523). In arguing
for some sort of analytical prowess of which we are not
capable at the moment, Jameson is putting the hope for a
solution in a neo-Freudian construct: if we could only think
ourselves away from the matrix, it would no longer penetrate
us. This may be possible for Jameson or Baudrillard, but
what about Haraway or myself? I mistrust that totalizing
logic which would also exclude me; as a woman, I am linked
by the system of significations to that repressed "other"
against which this new "narrative dislocation" is posed.
Baudrillard's nostalgia for a private past, and Jameson's
characterization of the current condition as a sickness
(needing analytic therapy), exclude the object, locating
interiority once again within their experience.
[19] The pentrator/penetrated relationship is gender-neutral
in Freudian theory but enacted as male/female in clinical
praxis; will Baudrillard's theoretical loss of subjectivity
be recuperated in the practice of technology? The reaction
to no longer being excluded from the category of patient or
hysteric in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
parallels the reaction of men in this late twentieth century
who are no longer excluded from the category of
"penetrated." This reaction is utterly significant: in a
backlash against inclusion (signaled by the paranoid
reactions of Flaubert, Jameson, and Baudrillard), the
function of Freudian therapy (_Dora_) and technologies of
the bodies (_Neuromancer_) is to keep gender opposition
active. It's a fascinating pattern: Baudrillard's paranoid
reaction to being a receiving terminal, penetrated
continually by the hegemony, should be a warning for cyborgs
seeking to strategize resistance to high technology. Even
more symptomatically, Paul Virilio has declared: "We must
take hold of the enigma of technology and lay her on the
table" (_Pure War_).
[20] It's dangerous to argue for a material uniqueness in
the function of the panopticon, precisely because it
prevents us from recognizing this continuing pattern of
discipline and resistance, especially the way in which
certain types of resistance are codifed to support the
disciplinary society. Is there any space in a postnatural
future for a female subject with interiority? Is it
possible for a reading to occur which locates women in the
position of subject? Although the human capacity to
generate or make sense of facts and information has already
been surpassed by computers, resistance to the matrix may
work for Baudrillard. In William Gibson's cyberpunk
manifesto, _Neuromancer_, the (bachelor) machine
incorporates high technology differently than the body does.
The technologies of which Baudrillard speaks have been
seamlessly incorporated to liberate men from their bodies
and, as such, the mind/body paradigm is reclaimed as
male/female with chilling results. That _Neuromancer_ was
intended as an historicized future is evident in Gibson's
description of the novel: What's most important to me is
that it's about the present. It's not really about an
imagined future. It's a way of trying to come to terms with
the awe and terror inspired in me by the world in which we
live" (Rosenthal, 85).
[21] Gibson's work, based as it is on the present encounter
with bodies and technologies, should inform any speculation
or theoretical vision of our future. Pam Rosenthal
describes Molly and Case, the heroes of the novel, as part
of "an elite cult" who feel "an existential righteousness
about diving into the matrix, braving its dangers, getting
as close as possible to the shape of algorithms that come
about as close to truth as anything does in the bad new
future" (90). The access to information, and the
surveillance tactics used to gather it, rests with
multinational corporations (zaibatsus) in _Neuromancer_.
Elite status is signaled by access to information in the
hierarchy of the matrix in _Neuromancer_: getting in to the
cyberspace of invisible facts equals power, and "not to be
able to jack in [to the matrix] is impotence" (Rosenthal,
85,102). Molly's experience of the matrix is fundamentally
different from Case's; the difference is informed by
constructions of gender, although their resistance to the
matrix (and zaibatsus) makes both of them more malleable and
exploitable by the companies that control the matrix.
[22] Neither Case nor Molly want the life of the "little
people," or, as Case puts it "company job, company hymn,
company funeral" (37). Case makes his living as an
information cowboy, able to jack in to the matrix, to fix
his addiction to cyberspace/access/information. In this
way, the mind/body separation is encoded via technologies of
the body, and it's furthered by the structure of the novel:
whenever Case jacks in to the matrix, Gibson begins a new
paragraph, highlighting the separation between the body and
the mind/matrix. Case doesn't seem to have a body unless he
is inside Molly, either in sex or in sim/stim. In the first
case, Case's visual description recalls images of the matrix
and, in the second, he perceives Molly's bodily sensations
electronically. Molly is the body. Case can jack out at
any time.
[23] Molly gets into cyberspace, too, but only so that her
body can be programmed during "puppet time." Freud's dictum
that "there is no 'No' in the unconscious" is literally true
for Molly in this situation. She paid for the
reconstructive surgeries by working as a "meat puppet," a
high-tech form of prostitution in which a receptor chip is
implanted in a woman's brain. The chip provides reception
for the "house software," chosen by the customer. So what
happens when Molly is with a customer? Her cyberspace is
blank and her access to the matrix doesn't disconnect her
body from other bodies (witness Case). The programs used on
Molly were progressively violent after the house found out
she was using the money she made to become a ninja, to
construct a body capable of being a killing machine. The
function of the software to direct Molly's actions mimics,
terrifyingly, Freud's version of the unconscious:
You know how I got the money, when I was starting out?
. . . once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like
free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that's it.
Renting the goods, is all. You aren't in, when it's
all happening. House has software for whatever a
customer wants to pay for . . . . [t]hen it started
getting strange . . . . The house found out what I was
doing with the money. I had the blades in, but the
fine neuromotor work would take another three trips.
No way I was ready to give up puppet time . . . so the
bastard who ran the place, he had some custom software
cooked up. I wasn't conscious. It's like cyberspace,
but blank. Silver. It smells like rain....you can
see yourself orgasm, it's like a little nova right out
on the rim of space. (148-9)
[24] When Molly comes up out of puppet time, her reaction to
the scene for which she had been programmed is violent
opposition. Although her ability to react to the scene is
an accident of faulty wiring, it's a direct refutation of
the programming, the unconscious, and the technical
separation of mind and body:
I came up. I was into this routine with a customer.
Senator, he was. Knew his fat face right away. We
were both covered with blood. We weren't alone. She
was all. Dead. So I guess I gave the Senator what he
wanted...the house put a contract on me and I had to
hide for a little while. (148-149)
[25] Freud could have learned a few lessons from Molly about
whether the conscious mind can say "No" to the unconscious
drives. It is, however, an after-the-fact refusal; when
Molly is unconscious (to a degree Freud could never have
imagined), she seems totally incapable of resisting; it is
the dysfunction of high technology that allows Molly's
"No." The circle has been completed with techobodies,
however: the access to the mind via science is complete, the
comfortable line between human and machine has been erased,
and the human therapist is no longer needed to interpret the
signals. It's a direct line.
[26] The Freudian therapeutic paradigm can be mapped onto
our relationship with (and struggle over) technologies of
the body. The array of technologies used to construct
bodies in _Neuromancer_ seem fantastical, even technically
impossible, yet the rush to develop technologies with which
we can construct our bodies will provide funding and
justification for their development, regardless of the
health risks involved. At a recent Senate hearing over the
safety of silicon breast implants (which have been known to
break down once inside the body and produce disabling
disease of the immune system), it was presumed that, despite
these proven health risks, implants should be available for
"cosmetic" uses. However, after testimony from "scores of
women" who testified to their need "because of what they
said they believed were their own deformities," many panel
members said they were "convinced that no line could be
drawn and no group of women could be defined for exclusion"
(Hilts). The cultural question of why "some women [are]
terrified of not having the option to reconstruct their
breasts" was never raised.
[27] The solution to the problem posed presented to the
F.D.A.? Surveillance. It was agreed that every woman who
had undergone or wished to have this operation be "kept
track of" in a database, set up by the companies which
manufacture the implants. One can't help but wonder if
these records, and the access to them, might be used later
to deprive the women of the protection allegedly promised to
them--perhaps in manufacturing a "safe" reading of the
implants or, alternatively, to prevent these women from
taking action (legal or otherwise) against the companies.
[28] The FDA case is simply one example of the need for some
sort of resistance to this future. The case has some
disturbing implications for Rosenthal's declaration that
"the matrix is too complex and fragmented to offer itself to
any one unifying gaze--a notion that does not seem entirely
reassuring to me" (95). This sentiment is problematic when
we look back at Dora, whose unifying gaze had the opposite
effect. Reiff acknowledges that Freud "had to admire Dora's
insight into this intricate and sad affair...Yet he fought
back with his own intricate insights into the tangle of her
motives.... Freud was to call this tenacious and most
promising of all forms of resistance 'intellectual
opposition'" (17). Compare this statement with the
following description: "Knowledge . . . is utterly immanent
and implicated in the forms and technologies of instrumental
power, and readable only to the extent that we have the
power to decode it. How we are known and what we know
constitute a matrix of unjustly distributed power . . ."
(99).
[29] This is Rosenthal, reading the matrix, yet it's an
uncanny characterization of the power dynamic that exists
between Dora and Freud. But what about the present? In the
wake of a reevaluation and, oftentimes, refutation of
Freudian theory, wasn't Freud's clinical method also
revised? Not completely; this clinical process is still
used
to manufacture belief and consent. In the latest issue of
_Mother Jones_ magazine (January/February 1993), Ethan
Watters reports on psychotherapists who help their patients
recover memories of physical and sexual abuse. The search
for these memories, in theory, seems auspicious at a time
when there is growing evidence that "childhood abuse is
widespread" and underreported. Working against Freud's
seduction theory, based on the assumption that patients'
memories of abuse were fantasy (29), some therapists have
taken the opposite tack, bringing past abuse to light by
examining their patients' subconscious memories. In theory,
this hopeful disruption of Freud's seduction theory promises
to validate and treat the pain of childhood abuse.
[30] This theoretical promise can be destroyed within a
clinical method that recalls Freud's relationship with Dora.
Using hypnosis, suggestion, trance writing, and dream
analysis, therapists "search [the patient's] subconscious"
for signs of abuse (26). Watters found that many of these
memories were false, but are made real for the patient. The
case of Kathy Gondolf reveals the process by which her
beliefs were used against her to construct the version of
her past held by the therapist. When Gondolf sought help
for chronic bulimia, she told her therapist that she had
been abused by an uncle during childhood. Watters reports
that "[l]ater, during individual and group therapy, [the
therapist] used dream analysis and trance writing to search
her unconscious for signs that other members of the family
had abused her as well" (26). Gondolf's account of this
therapy is a poignant reminder of the power dynamic in the
relationship between therapist and patient:
You're sitting there and someone has taken everything
you thought you know about your family--the people you
love--and twisted it. They tell you that everything
you knew for twenty, thirty, forty years was wrong....
It was devastating for me. Everything is so simple in
the world of repressed memories, . . . if you claim
that your parents cared for you, then they
[psychotherapists] say that you are in denial.
Anything you say can be misinterpreted. There is no
way around it. This is costing people their lives.
(26)
[31] The women in her therapy group all claimed to have
repressed memories of abuse as children, and one woman
killed herself after "discovering" these memories. Gondolf,
like Molly in _Neuromancer_, was released from this regimen
when the supporting apparatus malfunctioned: her insurance
ran out. Gondolf began to "examine repressed memories on
her own" and, like Schreber, found treatment in being her
own interpreter. She "became convinced" that "her therapist
had coerced her and the other members of her group into
imagining memories of abuse" (26). Forced out of the
system, Gondolf relied on her own conscious memories to
construct the truth of her history.
[32] Is it possible to be "forced out" of the relationship
between bodies and technologies? We cannot choose to end
this relationship, as Dora chose to end her relationship
with Freud. Nor can we escape the deluge of electronic
texts. If any resistance to the "gradual accommodation of
the machine" is possible, it will depend upon our reaction
to the machine, and a continual realization that the machine
is a human creation, a social creation. In late
twentieth-century capitalism, has anything else assumed the
role of therapist for us? In the struggle over
representation, the media is given the power of
interpretation; just as anything that is "conscious"
knowledge (articulated by the patient) could not, by
definition, belong to the "unconscious," we are re-enacting
the role of interpreter of reality with media. In doing so,
we lend strength to the role of media by centering
resistance within that arena.
[33] In resisting hegemony via the struggle for
representation, we may re-enact the binary opposition of
representer/represented (and, on the same axis,
therapist/patient); this resistance focuses on and
strengthens the textual/media arena in which our actions are
interpreted and represented. The exclusivity and
limitations of television have been disrupted in the
strategies of ACT-UP. The organization has found a way to
use televised media without having financial access to them
(staging protests during broadcasts as audience members, for
instance).
[34] We need to reconsider the issues of media(s) and
representations with respect to the ways we define
ourselves. Technology, having been taken into the body and
reproduced (the male gaze being but one example), poses some
immediate challenges. _Neuromancer_ is the circle
completed: technologies of the body connect the flesh to the
computer. The issues raised here with respect to the
post-natural future, and the questions of resistance, are
urgent. Remembering the patterns of discipline and
resistance, and the space to which the other has been
assigned, might be a first step in helping us to describe
and resist the "slow apocalypse" of technology (Rosenthal,
96).
[35] It's not simply that the body must claim its resistance
against the machine; when recuperation is instantaneous one
can resist only though finding new ways of resistance that
don't operate through negation, or marginalization.
Resistance that succeeds is a testament to the interpretive
power of individuals to make sense of their lives. I hope
to have presented some warnings and historical precedents
that may help one actualize and resist power in a time when
our ability to do so is matched against and challenged by
our encounter with technology.
-----------------------------------------------------------
NOTES
^1^ I have chosen to cite from _The Foucault Reader_,
edited by Paul Rabinow (Pantheon Books: New York, 1984),
because selections from Foucault's _Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison_ [translated by Alan Sheridan,
Panthon Books (Random House) 1977] are brilliantly excerpted
in the section titled "Discipline and Sciences of the
Individual" (pp. 169-239). The excerpts describe many of
the terms and issues used in my paper, particularly the
formulation of the term "discipline" and the uses of "the
examination" to further surveillance and power.
-----------------------------------------------------------
WORKS CITED
Baudrillard, Jean. "The Ecstasy of Communication." _The
Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture_. Ed. Hal
Foster. Seattle: Bay Press, 1983.
Chabot, Barry C. _Freud on Schreber: Psychoanalytic Theory
and The Critical Act_. Amherst: U Mass Press, 1982.
Foucault, Michel. _Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison_. Trans. by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon
Books (Random House), 1977.
Freud, Sigmund. _Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria_.
Introduction by Philip Reiff. Collier Books, New York:
1963.
---. "Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account
of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)." _The
Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud_. Trans. James Strachey. Volume XII:9. London:
Hogarth, 1958-1974.
Gibson, William, _Neuromancer_. Ace: New York: 1984.
Goldstein, Jan. "The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and
Literary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century France."
_Representations_, v. 34 (Spring 1991): 134-166.
Haraway, Donna J. _Simians, Cyborgs, and Women_. New York:
Routledge, 1991.
Hilts, Philip, "F.D.A. Panel Cites Need to Keep Breast
Implants." _The New York Times_, November 15th, 1991,
p. A8.
Jameson, Fredric. "Nostalgia for the Present." _The South
Atlantic Quarterly_ v. 88, no. 2 (1989): 521-32.
Mitchell, Juliet. _Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud,
Reich, Laing, and Women_. New York: Vintage Books,
1975.
---. "Femininity, Narrative, and Psychoanalysis." _Women,
The Longest Revolution_. Virago Press, Ltd., 1982.
Rabinow, Paul, Ed. _The Foucault Reader_. Pantheon Books:
New York, 1984.
Rosenthal, Pam. "Jacked In: Fordism, Cyberspace, and
Cyberpunk." _Socialist Review_ (Spring 1991): 87-103.
Schreber, Daniel Paul. _Memoirs of My Nervous Illness_.
Trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter. London:
Dawson, 1955.