Machine as Messiah: Cyborgs, Morphs, and the American Body Politic

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On September 22, 1676, a Dr. Brakenbury conducted the first human dissection by Europeans in North America. Samuel Sewell's diary records that a Mr. Hooper, taking the [heart] in his hand, affirmed it to be the stomack.' As James Schramer and Timothy Sweet have remarked, this misrepresentation of the internal organs of a geopolitical enemy was necessary to that ideological apparatus whereby the Puritan community gained its sense of social cohesion. The community of saints had inherited from monarchical England a single image, the body politic, to legitimate coherence as a political organization. But this image was deeply problematic in the absence of a monarch as head. It was thus necessary to demonstrate the community's coherence as a body in relative and oppositional terms. In essence, the corporeal integrity of the Puritan community was confirmed by demonstrating the tangibly inhuman, bodily disorganization not only among but inside the savages. By this means, moreover, figural violence in the battle between good and evil legitimated physical violence.2 This structural necessity haunts us today: that section of the American population which both conceives of itself self-consciously as democratic and unconsciously as healthy cells and organs in the body politic requires a nonhuman other which it can eviscerate in order to confirm its own political and spiritual legitimacy.3 Real change occurs only insofar as there is politically opportune evolution in this Other: Native Americans, Redcoats, urban immigrants, Communists, and, since the end of the Cold War, drug dealers, feminists, homosexuals, PC academics, black jurists, and so on.4