apcampbell

The field of meanings that constitutes the artificial body has lasting ramifications. As the female organic body is replaced with the artificial body of the woman, the host of symbols and meanings contained therein are taken as real, and as natural. The result is that the artificial body is normative. In the heavily sexualized artificial body of the woman, for example, beauty is standardized. Haraway notes that the racialized and sexualized body is the object of knowledge. The body, in fact, is totally obscured by racializations and sexualizations - by artificial constructions. The underlying organic body is made totally invisible. The telos of this process is twofold. On the one hand, the subject is unconscious of or only dimly aware that he or she is living under constant threat of physical violence - the furtive contract of the nation-state thus protected. The second half is that social control can become more sophisticated through the normative meanings attached to the creation of the artificial body, which through media, technology, knowledge, and physical intervention, replaces the organic body.

The phenomenon about which Austin writes here is one that has always intrigued me. There exists a reality and there exists an *idea* of that reality.  What other way do we come to know what is real other than through sensation?  The ‘underlying organic body’ is none other than sensation, is it not?  If we are under social control through our identification with the ‘artificial body’ (our idea of ourself) as Austin suggests, then can we not free ourselves from all forms of control by working consciously to shift the locus of our self-identity from the idea to the reality; from artificial body to organic body?  Does this not simply take place through rooting our awareness so strongly in sensation that we gaze through the veil of the artificial body and see it’s contruction actively taking place against the background of the organic body?  How can we be sure that our ‘awareness’ of the artificial body is none other than yet another mental construction unless we *feel* what is real: sensation. 
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