Liquid Metal by Redmond Sean;

Author:Redmond, Sean;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004020, Performing Arts/Film & Video/Guides & Reviews
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2005-01-19T05:00:00+00:00

Technophilia: Technology, Representation and the Feminine

Mary Ann Doane

The concept of the ‘body’ has traditionally denoted the finite, a material limit that is absolute – so much so that the juxtaposition of the terms ‘concept’ and ‘body’ seems oxymoronic. For the body is that which is situated as the precise opposite of the conceptual, the abstract. It represents the ultimate constraint on speculation or theo-risation, the place where the empirical finally and always makes itself felt. This notion of the body as a set of finite limitations is, perhaps, most fully in evidence in the face of technological developments associated with the Industrial Revolution. In 1858, the author of a book entitled Paris writes, ‘Science; as it were, proposes that we should enter a new world that has not been made for us. We would like to venture into it; but it does not take us long to recognise that it requires a constitution we lack and organs we do not have.’1 Science fiction, a genre specific to the era of rapid technological development, frequently envisages a new, revised body as a direct outcome of the advance of science. And when technology intersects with the body in the realm of representation, the question of sexual difference is inevitably involved.

Although it is certainly true that in the case of some contemporary science fiction writers – particularly feminist authors – technology makes possible the destabilisation of sexual identity as a category, there has also been a curious but fairly insistent history of representations of technology that work to fortify – sometimes desperately – conventional understandings of the feminine. A certain anxiety concerning the technological is often allayed by a displacement of this anxiety onto the figure of the woman or the idea of the feminine. This has certainly been the case in the cinema, particularly in the genre which most apparently privileges technophilia, science fiction. And despite the emphasis in discourses about technology upon the link between the machine and production (the machine as a labour-saving device, the notion of man as a complicated machine which Taylorism, as an early twentieth-century attempt to regulate the worker’s bodily movements, endeavored to exploit), it is striking to note how often it is the woman who becomes the model of the perfect machine. Ultimately, what I hope to demonstrate is that it is not so much production that is at stake in these representations as reproduction.

The literary text that is cited most frequently as the exemplary forerunner of the cinematic representation of the mechanical woman is L’Eve future (Tomorrow’s Eve), written by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam in 1886. In this novel, Thomas Edison, the master scientist and entrepreneur of mechanical reproduction – associated with both the phonograph and the cinema – is the inventor of the perfect mechanical woman, an android whose difference from the original human model is imperceptible. Far from investing in the type of materialism associated with scientific progress, Villiers is a metaphysician. Edison’s creation embodies the Ideal (her name is Hadaly which is, so we are told, Arabic for ‘the Ideal’).

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