Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man Technology Takes Over. - book review

Ollivier Dyens

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001

Written with a passion for humanity and a utopian lust for science, Metal and Flesh considers the status and future of the body in machine culture. Author Ollivier Dyens frames the body as a topographical meeting ground for biology and ideology. His goal is to position the body as a cultural, rather than strictly biological entity; one that has been marked by a culture that is increasingly technology-infused. This positioning has as much significance for humans on a grand cultural scale as it does on an individual, corporeal level.

Dyens ultimately establishes two schemas for the body. In one, our bodies are rewritten to be cultural, ideological and scientific indices of the world around us--not that these three registers are mutually exclusive. In the other, the world around us, constellations of those environmental and social properties our bodies index, becomes another, networked body. This second body is rooted in the machines we make and with which we probe ourselves. If we use our corporeal bodies to interpret the world around us, this second body is the matrix by which we interpret our metaphysics.

Dyens expresses a motivation to establish a 20 relationship between genetic and non-genetic material, between humans and the technologies they have created. In part, this motivation is fueled by the rise in technologies designed by humans in order to design humans--in genetic engineering, prostheses, etc. The book focuses on this "cultural biology" of the twentieth century, arguing that while the body "has always been subjected to extra-genetic influences," this is the century in which the relationship between the organic body and those influences has been most intense and most visible.

Metal and Flesh is a short, accessible book, written by a passionate, if loquacious, author. Organized less as one comprehensive thesis and more as a series of short essays, the text outlines one vision of the impetus to create new "intelligent" technologies, the present status of their worldly and biological manifestations, and the potential for man-machine relations. As with the chosen historical epoch, Dyens's references are notably contemporary. While the final of the book's three chapters contains an interesting reading of cultural biology through the filters of Wells, Kafka and Orwell, the author's references and bibliography is unique in its use of media arts texts to read media culture.

This positioning may be enjoyed by fluent media scholars looking for comparison within the economy of recent ideas, as well as newcomers looking for additional references. Others may find the (con)textual framing of Metal and Flesh a bit limited. For instance, his notes do not extend to discussion of phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, who have been prominent in establishing the paradigm in which our current state of being seems more than anomalous. Whether it is because of this limited focus, or a result of some unstated intention to question rather than answer the call of technology, the book leaves to its successors much room for discussion. Nevertheless, it is a very important contribution to the growing field of body-studies and to media culture, at large.

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