Plastic life, organ(ic)s of death: A take on Cronenberg’s Crimes of the  Future 

“Life in plastic is fantastic. 

Imagination, life is your creation.” 

– Aqua 

Introduction 

In his disturbing depiction of a fictional art milieu centered on performance artists who  modify their bodies in front of an ecstatic audience, in the most literal sense flaunting  their external and internal organs, Cronenberg raises questions about changing Beauty standards and declining sensibility, and puts his finger on the wound of contemporary  tendencies such as plastic surgery, body politics, and virtual sex.  

This essay searches for the link between these social phenomena and art, drawing on the  Cronenberg film Crimes of the future (2022) as a paradigm for the human body becoming  a plain surface of art. As a crucial implication, the question must be allowed as to what extent the human body can be morally acceptable as an object of art and, more abstractly  and merely conjecturally, whether the excessive fixation on the human body and its  undeniably pornographic nature can be responsible both for the „agony of Eros,“ as  philosopher Byung-Chul Han puts it in his eponymous book, as well for a general visual  flattening in art as a result of lost sensibility. 

AUSZUG – EXCERPT

Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, 2023.

Inside the continous staircase. An Allegory?

4. A TRAGIC HERO?  

In the canon of Greek mythology, the motifs of return and repetition occupy a distinct and  privileged position. Repetition is often equated with torment. Prometheus must watch as his  liver is torn apart by an eagle, only for it to grow again the next day and the hellish game to  begin anew. The rock that Sisyphus rolls up the mountain rolls down again before it reaches the  top. Tantalus, standing hungry and thirsty in the water, sees the fruit recede before his eyes as  he reaches for it. The punished are condemned to eternal repetition. They provoked they gods,  so they had to be punished. Interestingly, this elevates them to the divine sphere of immortally  themselves, but as an endless cycle of repetition, it ultimately manifests as a form of torment.  

The image of Sisyphus ascending the mountain — this immediately evokes associations with  the concept of the infinite staircase. Like the subject of the staircase, he is subject to a movement  whose aim is the infinite execution of the same and which knows no end. The futility of his  endeavor is illustrated by his rock rolling down, which subsequently becomes a symbol of his  fate. Sisyphus becomes the revenant of countless, hopeless attempts. Here, the similarities end.  For repetition in the myth of Sisyphus does not appear as the empty passage of time, but rather  reveals a tension between the two repetitive moments of ascending and descending, which one  would look for in vain on the infinite staircase. For Deleuze, the tension between repetitions  introduces a difference within in the repetition itself, which is ultimately essential for the  preservation of the self:

“There is a self wherever a furtive contemplation has been established, whenever a contracting machine capable of drawing a difference from repetition functions  somewhere.”¹

The dichotomy of the polar directions of ‘above’ and ‘below’ represent two places of different  design and connotation. The spatial hierarchy of ‘above’ and ‘below’ particularly lends a tragic  dimension to Sisyphus’ actions. Reaching the summit is not the triumph he hopes for, but the  beginning of his fall. The association of the ‘above’ with the divine shows Sisyphus his limits  and lets him painfully experience the humanity for which he sacrificed himself, while facing  the ‘below’ of the down-rolling rock. The descent becomes a promise for Sisyphus, as he  accepts it and thus reverses his fate. As Camus posits in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1955): 

“The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no  fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.” ²

To juxtapose the ascendancy with the descendancy,  this alone would cause a rift in the structure, which remains intact and meaningless in the ascent  of the infinite staircase. The subject would ‘emerge into the rift’ and open up to possible future  that contradicts external repetition. This distinction prompts Camus to conclude his  interpretation of Sisyphus being a fortunate man who discovers his freedom in the moment he  seizes his fate: „The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must  imagine Sisyphus happy. „³

4.1. THE MYTH OF NARCISSUS 

In German there are the words wieder [again] and wider [against]. Both  sound the same, which can cause confusion. Then there is the word  widerspiegeln [reflect]. What does it mean? Similar to spiegeln, it also means  ‘to reflect’. But it would mean to ‘reflect against’ – projecting an image  against a mirror that throws it back to you. It is a therefore a visual echo. What  is an echo, a reflected image, or an intellectual reflection other than the idea  of repetition? ‘Again’. And then, again, both words sound the same. An echo,  again. 

Fascinated, Narcissus catches a glimpse of himself on the reflective surface. The resolution, which should hardly come as a surprise after the previous pages. Not Prometheus, not Sisyphus:  Narcissus is the tragic hero of the staircase. 

According to my interpretation in the following pages, the myth of Narcissus is less about the  misrecognition [Verkennung] of the self (what might be expressed as self-forgetfulness of  Narcissus contemplation), but rather about the ignorance towards of the Other and the radical  exclusion of all things other. The place where Narcissus contemplates his reflection is a place  of withdrawal from otherness to sameness, which excludes the Other. Narcissus even fails to  recognize the element of the Other, that, is indeed present in the myth: Echo appears to  Narcissus literally as the repetition of his uttered words. Yet the voice is a form of the Other  that recoils from any appropriation. “The voice comes from elsewhere, from the outside, from  the Other. The voices one hears elude localization”, writes Byung-Chul Han⁴ in The Expulsion  of the Other (2016). As will be demonstrated subsequently, it is precisely the outside or  elsewhere, that Narcissus negates as his gaze takes on a state of detachment: The reflective  surface of the water functions as an atopic place of repetition. The parallels to the concept of  the impossible staircase are thus drawn. The phenomenological dimension of the myth is not  self-absorption; rather, it is recursivity. Its structure begins with the Other who is the same. In  the case of Narcissus, the Other is described before he announces himself. (The course of the  steps is anticipated before they are taken.) From this perspective, the myth of Narcissus also  carries a paradox: Narcissus sees himself in the mirror and does not actually see himself.

In   response to the question of whether Narcissus is destined for a long age, Ovid has the seer  Tiresias proclaim: “If he does not get to know himself” [si se non noverit]. 

In excluding psychoanalytical interpretations (that might have iconized Narcissus for their  porpoise), in ignoring the numerous literary and artistic representations of the myth, the  following still can be said: The myth of Narcissus concerns an individual who gazes into a  reflective surface and is unable to reconcile the image reflected therein with his own perception  of himself. The following section is dedicated to this observation. How does Narcissus perceive  himself, his reflection, and the space around him? What are the boundaries of the mirror? Does  this place, Narcissus’ space, already have structures that isolate Narcissus and exclude the  Other? Can we conclude from these observations that the myth primarily stages the  misrecognition of the Other? 

1. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repition (New York: Colombia University Press, 1994), 78. ↩︎
2. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York : Vintage Books, 1991), 121. ↩︎
3. Ibid., 123. ↩︎
4. Byung Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 51. ↩︎

AUSZUG – EXCERPT

Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, 2024.