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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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There is an excellent essay by Ian Hacking in the excellent new issue of the UofT mag with the not so excellent name, Idea&s. Hacking writes about technology ushering us back into Cartesian ways of conceiving mind and body. He talks about a huge range of stuff including organ donation, Japanese attitudes to organ donation, genetics, Body Worlds, cyborgs and brain death. It's not online. Here's a couple of tidbits:
For quite some time, our popular culture has had a vision of creatures that are neither human nor machine, but some mix of the two. Yet the ethnographic facts about these fabulous beings are not what one might expect. They have a far more entrenched role in Japan than in the West. This fact is of curious interest in connection with brain death.
[...]
We think that a person who is maintained simply by machine and who has no consciousness is finished. We say, oddly, that the person has become a vegetable. We mean that there is nothing there but a mechanism. Hence, there is no longer a person there in the hospital bed. We are content to say, "brain dead, so dead indeed." Note how Cartesian we are. The soul, we think, has flown; now there is only a body kept going by chemistry and mechanics."
The Marvels of Chemistry
Speaking of petroleum, let's take a look at the photograph on this page. What's that? You don't see what petroleum has to do with it? Well, look again! Except for those objects made of metal — and of course, the people themselves— almost everything in the photograph is made of synthetic or man-made materials. What's more, most of those materials were originally derived from petroleum, and they are among the many marvels of chemistry.
(note: images and quote are excerpted from a clipping from an old Disney kid's book on science, featuring Donald Duck & his brood ... circa. 1965?)
Yesterday M.Jean and I went to see Body Worlds 2. It was both utterly predictable and entirely fascinating. I thought of it as an R&D mission, but I don't have anything conclusive to report. At least not yet. A few notes:
The show is really sexist which is distracting and irritating. All the female cadavers are in super-feminine poses: ballet, figure skating, angel, and the so-called "Yoga Lady" could as easily be titled "Doggy Style." feh. Given that the premise of the show is about as essentialist as you can get, the unsophisticated cultural overlay was pretty annoying.
A weird detail is that each display bears a brushed steel placard with Gunther Von Hagens' signature. It's all very 19th century curio-cabinet, which I find kind of groovy and grotesque.
The show is laced with big purple banners carrying quotes from Nietsche, Goethe, Kant, Sartre, and the like. Secular and existential and weirdly comforting.
The dead guy playing baseball is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen.
Both M. Jean and I thought we could smell human decay on more than one occasion, and both of us suspected it was just our imagination.
The body parts are really neat and I was not repelled or disgusted. I held a Plastinated human brain in my hand, which felt a tad transgressive. By the end of the exhibit, other (living) people's faces looked the way I felt: thoughtful, mildly deppressed, and mildly confused. Afterwards I felt leaden and tired, as if I'd been watching trashy TV for 12 hours.
A few quotes:
"Societies that lose all sense of reverence for the dead will lose it also for the living."
- Andrew Stuttaford
"What I do is not art, nor is it science,' he says. 'It reaches into artistry but the effect goes beyond education because feelings and emotions are involved."
- Gunther Von Hagens, quoted by Imogen O'Rorke in the Observer.
"It would take a lot of beers for me to be attracted to a skinless woman. So beauty is skin deep and this exhibit proves it. Or does it? There is something profoundly beautiful about the skinless body. I propose that the famous saying should be corrected. Sexy is skin deep whereas beauty goes through to the bone. [...] I do not perceive it as gratuitous exploitation, or even if it is, it is justifiable as it invites us (or invited me at any rate) to confront the unthinkable. There is no snobbery, just an unforgettable and accessible presentation of anatomy and a desire to give knowledge."
- Jim Eadon