SUSAN BORDO
"MATERIAL GIRL":
THE EFFACEMENTS OF
POSTMODERN CULTURE
1. Plasticity as Postmodern Paradigm
In a culture in which organ transplants, life-extension machinery,
microsurgery and artificial organs have entered everyday medicine,
we seem on the verge of practical realization of the seventeenthcentury imagination of the body as machine. But if we seem to have
technically and technologically realized that conception, it can also
be argued that metaphysically we have deconstructed it. In the early
modern era, machine imagery helped to articulate a totally determined human body whose basic functionings the human being was
helpless to alter. The then dominant metaphors for this bodyclocks, watches, collections of springs-imagined a system that is
set, wound up, whether by nature or God the watchmaker, ticking
away in predictable, orderly manner, regulated by laws over which
the human being has no control. Understanding the system, we can
help it to perform efficiently, and intervene when it malfunctions.
But we cannot radically alter the configuration of things.
Pursuing this modern, determinist fantasy to its limits, fed by the
currents of consumer capitalism, modern ideologies of the self, and
their crystallization in the dominance of "American" mass culture,
Western science and technology have now arrived, paradoxically
but predictably (for it was a submerged, illicit element in the mechanist conception all along) at a new, "postmodern" imagination of
human freedom from bodily determination. Gradually and surely, a
technology that was first aimed at the replacement of malfunctioning parts has generated an industry and an ideology fueled by fantasies of re-arranging, transforming, and correcting, an ideology of
limitless improvement and change, defying the historicity, the mortality, and indeed the very materiality of the body. In place of that
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