Cybersurgery and Surgical (Dis)embodiment: Technology, Science, Art and the Body

Abstract

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin deploys the analogy of the magician and surgeon to illustrate the different ways in which the painter (magician) and cameraman (surgeon) technologically mediate, and hence alter, our perception of reality. For Benjamin, the use of camera equipment by the cameraman refigures reality by technologically penetrating and re-presenting it as “multiple fragments” (227). This penetration is, according to Benjamin, unlike that of the painter, whose “distance from reality” (227) enables a more total representation of reality than the fragmented one presented in film. Benjamin’s use of the figure of the surgeon to illustrate how the technological mediation of reality constitutes a new condition of modernity is a radical, but surprisingly under-examined, evaluation of the mediated status of the body within contemporary medical science. By choosing the surgical penetration of the body as representative of an increasingly fragmented and technologically mediated reality, Benjamin inadvertently highlights the role of medical technologies and surgical practices in conceptions of the body. The result of this mediation is the fragmentation of the body through the medicalised focus upon specific body parts and organs, at the expense of the whole. At the same time, the increasing technological penetration of the body in medicine, which in Benjamin’s terms leads to a distortion of and disembodiment from reality (and hence the body), anticipates the current use of virtual and remote technologies in cybersurgical practices, where both imaging and surgical technologies penetrate the body.

This paper examines Benjamin’s understanding of technological mediation and fragmented reality in specific relation to the surgical mediation of the body and to conceptions of embodiment. Through a focus upon the historical development of surgery in the late eighteenth century and its current practices, the paper demonstrates Benjamin’s relevancy in understanding the mediation of the body, and processes of (dis)embodiment, through the lens of surgical technologies. At the same time, it critiques Benjamin’s assertion that the painter and surgeon offer different versions of reality by analysing the intimate relationship between art and surgery, as a set of perceptions and practices, in the (historical) mediation of the body, examining their similarities and differences.* The paper shows the importance of Benjamin’s work in understanding the surgical mediation and medical treatment of the body in (late)modernity and in the (dis)embodied practices of (cyber)surgery. In doing so, it seeks to re-embody the body by calling attention to the artistic and technological processes which underpin the practice of surgery, critiquing the authority of medical science in conceiving and managing the body as a fragmented, disembodied form.

* The current exhibition, How Do You Look? Visual Cognition in painting and surgery, at the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of London, is an example of how artists and surgeons share similar ways of seeing, and explores the intersections between imaging and surgical technologies.