The chemical interface

              TRHNSFORMHTIONS
"'That's a hypercard. I thought you said
Snow Crash was a drug,' Hiro says, now
totally nonplussed.
'It is,' the guy says. 'Try it.'
'Does it fuck up your brain?' Hiro says. 'Or
your Computer?'
'Both. Neither. What's the difference?'"
(Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash)
"You see control can never be a means to any
practical end... It can never be a means to
anything but more control... Like junk...."
(Williain Burroughs, The Naked Lunch)
The cyborg has many stories, histories,
and prehistories. But for all of their
scope and diversity, most of these
accounts have ignored one of the
cyborg's earhest and most definitive
features: its dependence on drugs. Before
it was anything else, the cyborg was a
junkie.
First named in a 1960 article by
Clynes and KHne called "Drugs, Space
and Cybernetics," this early cybemetic
organism emerged in the course of
discussions about the biochemical,
physiological, and electronic functioning
of the human organism and the
modifications which might facihtate its
life in ahen or extraterrestrial
environments. [1] The cyborg was to be
equipped with a prosthetic device, a
sophisticated syringe known as the
osmotic pressure pump capsule, and
designed for "continuous slow injections
of biochemically active substances at a
biológica] rate." Defining the cyborg as
an entity which "deliberately
incorporales exogenous components
extending the self-regulatory control
function of the organism," Clynes and
Khne explored the outer ümits of human
modification, and discussed their work
on "a new preparation which may
greatly enhance hypnotizability so that
The Chemical
Interface
pharmacological and hypnotic
approaches may be symbiotically
combinad." Their work dealt with the
pharmacological possibilities of
adjusting the organism's metabolism, its
ability to process food and fluids, its
enzyme system, vestibular function,
cardiovascular control, muscular
maintenance, and perceptual abilities. It
referred to ways of moderating sleep and
wakefulness "through the use of that
group of drugs known as psychic
energizers, with adjunctive medication"
already in use, and Usted the challenges
posed by variations in pressure and
temperature, radiation, magnetic fields,
and gravitational forcé, as well as
discussing ways of combating the
psychoses and relieving the "sensory
invariance and action deprivation"
which might await the traveller in space,
and considering techniques for inducing
unconsciousness, or limbo states, in
times of diré emergency or pain.
Clynes and Kline's cyborg has a
history of drug use which extends
through its military, medical and
industrial pasts. Drugs lace its
genealogies. The osmotic pressure pump
with its permanent syringe, made their
cyborg the exemplary case of an
organism indissoluble from its drugs, the
addict taken to a new extreme. But
when Clynes and KUne's paper was
recently repubUshed, ^drugs' were
dropped from its title. The article is now
titled "Cyborgs and Space." This change
of ñame is indicative of the extent to
which drugs have slipped out of
mainstream discussions of the cyborg.
They have, of course, been explored in
some cyberpunk fictions, not least of all
in Richard Kadrey's Metrophage, Neal
Stephenson's Snow Crash, and much of
WiUiam Gibson's work. But while the
role of artificial organs and other more
spectacuiar prostheses has been
ampiified in the recent wave of
discussions on the cyborg theme, the
chemical interface has been conspicuous
only by its absence.
* * *
This neglect is only theoretical, of
course. In practice, recent decades of
medical and mUitary practice and
unauthorized street use have produced
such a proliferation of drugs, users, and
techniques of ingestión, that the
chemical interface now constitutes one
of the most sophisticated, widely
explored and intimate of all the
technical changes which can be made to
the human. The drug-induced cyborg
scrambles boundaries with far more
insistence than its drug-free equivalents,
providing one of the most fertile zones in
which to trace the emergence of the
cyborg and to explore the collapse of
older distinctions between human and
machine, nature and artifice, the
intimate and the alien, the inside and
the outside of bodies. As killers of pain
and infection, drugs are also crucial to
the success of the prostheses and
transplants with which the cyborg is
more usually associated. Operations
without anesthetics had been as
tENnO A H A N D C O Of AHE MODBMO
imprecise as they were painful, and it
was not until Joseph Priestly's late
eighteenth century discovery of nitrous
oxide that surgical techniques could be
perfected on patients insensitive to the
knife. Nitrous oxide was followed by
ether, chloroform and, in 1805, the
derivation of morphine from opium. The
first anaesthetized operation was
performed in 1846 to headlines which
read: "HAIL HAPPY HOUR! WE
HA VE CONQUERED PAIN!"
Drugs have also operated with the
singular intimacy of substances coursing
through the bloodstream, exercising
direct effects on the very infrastructure
of the body which other technologies are
only now beginning to approach. One of
the clearest impUcations of Clynes and
Kline's research was that even the most
unadulterated and sober organism is an
already self-regulating biochemical
machine, an open system predisposed to
synthesizing, and interacting with, a
wide variety of substances. This was a
body whose self-regulating biochemical
controls were not so much new, as newly
exposed by its reconfiguration for
survival in space. Its drugs were alien
substances for use in alien environments
but, at the same time, they were nothing
more than quantitative extensions of the
body's "natural" Communications and
defense systems. By virtue of their
simple effectivity, drugs inform the body
of its status as a finely tuned and
malleabie chemical machine whose
reality is, at least to some extent,
composed of a chemically-influenced set
of perceptions and conceptions. As
substances which mimic and connect
with the action of those synthesized by
the body itself, they made it impossible
to say where human ended and cyborg
began.
Many lines of high-level drugs
research were pursued in the 1960s. But
a series of psychedelic scandals in the
Sciences, the military, and the
intelligence services provoked rumors of
a war on drugs and a clamp-down on
research into several psychoactive
substances by the end of the decade.
Since then, with the exception of a few
highly specialized or even classified
programs of research, this war has
muted and distorted all debate, research
and experiment on drugs. Waged in an
effort to regúlate the chemical
composition of individuáis and
populations, the war on drugs demands
the control of all aspects of their
research and development as well as
their production, distribution and use.
And while only a few of the substances
discussed by Clynes and Kline have been
directly at issue in the so-called war on
drugs, prohibition has prejudiced even
speculative research such as theirs.
By 1960, the chemical cyborg had
many precedents. Medical research had
pushed experiments on the chemical
composition of the human organism to
unprecedented extremes. A generation of
women had been thrown into
dependency on the first wave of
tranquilizing substances; psychiatric
patients had been treated with a wide
variety of under-researched anti-psychotic
drugs. But the most direct
antecedents of Clynes and Kline's cyborg
on drugs were the products of military
experiment. Generations of soldiers,
sailors and pilots had been supplied,
sometimes unwittingly, with stimulants,
depressants, and hallucinogens in an
attempt to train even their intemal
chemistries to adapt to what would
otherwise be untenable conditions and
environments.
Such military uses of drugs have
an ancient history. The Spanish
conquistadors faced peoples who chewed
coca to sustain themselves on long treks
through high altitudes, and were
thought to use peyote as a means of
telecommunication. In the American
Civil War, opium was given to soldiers
orally in pill and tincture form, and
morphine was dusted into wounds. And
with the development of the hypodermic
syringe - the most immediate precursor
to Clynes and Kline's osmotic pressure
piunp - in 1857, all this could be
directly injected as well. The syringe was
a military device which, like a gun, was
to be used for shooting up, and also a
prosthetic organ, a device added onto
the body's existing means of ingesting
substances. Freud's early experiments
with cocaine were in part inspired by
Aschenbrandt's use of cocaine with the
Bavarían army. Opiates were widely
used where the poppies now flower in
the killing fields of the First World War
and, in the Second World War, Germán
troops used Methedrine, a brand of
speed, to elimínate fatigue and maintaín
physical endurance. Coínciding with the
emergence of cybemetics,
neurochemistry, and a new ínterest in
both human and machine intelligence,
the 1940s synthesis of LSD amplified
military ínterest in drugs. Operating in
the new anti-Communíst cHmate of the
cold war, the CÍA and the US military
experimented with LSD and analogous
hallucinogens with the same enthusiasm
it applied to the production and
distribution of drugs such as heroin and,
later, cocaine. MKULTRA, a CÍA
program begun in the 1950s, explored
the possibílitíes of using drugs such as
LSD and other forms of manipulation to
increase perceptual and conceptual
skills, enhance hypnosis, protect against
torture, alter personalítíes, influence
thoughts, debilítate ambition and
efficiency, and produce amnesia, •
confusión and even states of euphoria.
The Vietnam War has been described as
"a decisive point of íntersection between
pharmacology and the technology of
violence." Chasing the dragón in slow-action
replays, firíng through a smoke
screen of local weed, and playíng the
unwítting lab-rat in psychedelic
experiments, "America's conscript army
were 'wasted,' ('blítzed,' 'bombed out')
on heroin, marijuana and LSD." [2]
The cyborg imagined by Clynes
and Kline emerges from these intimate
connections between medicine and
military machines. In both their müitary
and medical contexts, drugs effectively
work as arms, weapons used to defend,
augment, attack or otherwise manipúlate
die structure and function of the
organism. [3] As medicines, they combat
pain, infection and instabüity; in other
capacities, they can heighten perception,
increase endurance and, as in Clynes
and Kline's case, completely reconfigure
the organism to aUow it to deal with any
modifications to itself or its
environment. The military drugs of the
late twentieth century allow pilots to
fuse with their planes, gurmers to melt
into their guns, and astronauts to
synchronize with their ships. Next scene:
obscene. "The presentation of the
images from aerial combat will be
projected directly into the pilot's
eyeballs with the aid of a helmet fitted
with optic fibers. This phenomenon of
hallucination approaches that of drugs,"
as Paul Virilio writes. [4] This dream of
£in intimate technology jacked directly
into the brain is only one of several ways
in which drugs and other intimate
technologies are now beginning to
converge, in ways only hinted at by
Clynes and Kline.
* * *
All weapons are ambivalent. Substances
sanctioned as medicines can be used to
quite contradictory ends in both human
individuáis and cultures. If the war on
drugs now stniggles to gain control of
the circulation of those substances
circumscribed by intemational law, the
modem, sanctioned use of drugs is only
the tip of the iceberg of drug use which
slides beneath the sober surfaces of
modem culture.
As soon as its oíd church
authorities and new medical institutions
had begun to control the use of its
home-grown medicines, Europe
encountered a new wave of drugs with
enchantments of their own. Tobacco,
hashish, opium and coca brought
unprecedented benefits and problems to
the Western world. In nineteenth-century
England, the opiates were
cheap, plentiful and without prejudice.
They were used by workers, poets and
everyone between: sick and healthy
chQdren aUke were dosed on "Godfrey's
Cordial" and a variety of other
preparations containing opium.
Laudanum was to be found in the
majority of working class cupboards
and, writing in the early 1820s, Thomas
De Quincey was assured that in London
"the number of amateur opium-eaters
(as I may term them) was, at this time,
immense." In Manchester, he was
"informed by several cotton-manufacturers,
that their work-people
were rapidly getting into the practice of
opium-eating; so much so, that on a
Saturday aftemoon the counters of the
druggists were strewn with one, two, or
three grains, in preparatíon for the
known demand of the evening." [5] The
cyborg-on-drugs is a throwback to
opiated workers in the factory or the
mili, hooked into the system, geared up
for production, caught up in cycles of
supply and demand.
Unüke their speedier heirs, the
opiates functíoned as fixatives and
safety-valves, travel-sickness pills
necessitated by the "etemal hurry" of
the times, pain-killers demanded by the
"colossíJ pace of advance." As De
Quincey wrote, opium was also
remtirkably attractive: "happiness might
now be bought for a penny, and carried
in the waistcoat pocket: portable
ecstasies might be had corked up in a
pint bottle: and peace of mind could be
sent down in gallons by the mail coach."
[6] And while Confessions of an English
Opium Eater was written with
enthusiasm for the drug. De Quincey's
second essay. Suspira de Profundis, was
a profound sigh of despair at his
enslavement to the drug.
By the end of the nineteenth
century, amidst a proHferation of newly
identified characters, another proto-cyborg
had emerged: the addict. If the
use of drugs had once been an activity,
it now became the defining
characteristic of users. 'Addict' was to
be one of the twentieth century's most
distinct identities, a subtly ahen entity;
an organism with another chemistry,
different perceptíons, capacities, desires;
a character whose body, as William
Burroughs was to write, "knows what
veins you can hit and conveys this
knowledge in the spontaneous
movements you make preparing to take
a shot... Sometimes the needle points
like a dowser's wand. Sometimes I must
wait for the message. But when it comes
I always hit blood." [7]
The formulation of the addict was
one of the earliest responses to the
increasingly vociferous demands for
drug control which marked the end of
the nineteenth century. The
contemporary war on drugs has its most
immediate roots in the reformist
movements which emerged in the United
States at this point, and led to the first
national drugs legislation in 1914.
International drugs controls were put in
place with the establishnjent of the
United Nations in the wake of the
Second World War.
By this time, opiates were hardly
the only substances to be controUed. The
nineteenth century had effectively
produced its own narcotics, in an
increasingly frantic effort to maintain
equilibrium, kill the pain and heal the
wounds of industrialization. [8] But
subsequent decades of technological
change were accompanied by a
proHferation of drugs, many of which
functioned to accelerate rather than to
relieve the pace of change. Opium use
may have countered the hyperactivity of
everyday life, but in the late nineteenth
century, a stressed-out America turned
to the stimulation of coca and cocaine in
a literal effort to keep up with the times.
There was a tendency to accelerate
bodies in accordance with the speeds
with which and environments in which
they lived into the twentieth century.
The synthesis of amphetamines was
popularizad by the introduction of
Benzedrine, a nasal inhaler, in 1932,
and by the late 1960s, McLuhan and
Fiore were suggesting that the "impulse
to use hallucinogens is a kind of
empathy with the electronic
environment," as well as "a way of
repudiating the oíd mechanical worid."
[9] Twenty years later, when the
widespread use of MDMA coincided with
the emergence of dance music and
digital culture, a new generation of drug
users reconfigured themselves to deal
with the rhythms, connections and
complexities made possible by their
machines.
* * *
Clynes and Kline's cyborg was b om in
the midst of long-standing, dispersad
experiments -some more legitímate than
others- with the pharmaceutical
rewiring of the organism. Their
prosthetic device was, in effect, an
advanced syringe; their cyborg's drugs
were sophisticated versions of substances
aheady in use; their cyborg itself was an
addict par excellence. And the drug-using
past of the cyborg is of more than
passing interest to its future. The addict,
its immediate precursor, was formulated
as a late nineteenth-century reaction to
what was then increasingly perceived as
the drugs problem. Like Foucault's
figure of the homosexual, brought onto
the scene at the very same time, the
addict served to contain activitíes which
were otherwise immeasurable and
certaLnly impossible to regúlate. The
establishment of the category "addict,'
also served to obscure the fact that the
sober are as chemically induced and
dependent as their drug using
equivalents.
And there is now a sense in which
the cyborg has also served to contain
what might otherwise have been an
impossible tangle of bodies, chemicals,
informatíon, machines, and all the
components of a world which actually
functions as a vast network of
interconnected elements, inconceivable
in its own terms. For all the talk of
fusions, interactions, links and
symbioses, the cyborg popularized by
the scriptwriters of Hollywood and
academic discourse has been configured
as an individuated entity, an organized
entíty, a self-regulating organism
intended to epitomize the modem ideal
of self-controUed man. The late
twentieth-century cyborg has classified,
limited and contained the practices,
experiments and exploratíons which t um
both humans and cyborgs into soft
machines.
By the same token, both of these
figures threaten to expose the very
conditions that their construction
conceals: the addict and the cyborg
problematize the possibility of natural,
unadulterated bodies and challenge the
modem individual's belief in its own
individuality and self-control. And, in
much the same way as the consolidation
of the addict has produced a multitude
of side-effects of its own - d r u g scenes,
cultures, writings, movies, pattems of
behavior, industries, economies, wars-so
the cyborg has written manifestos,
revolutionized conceptions of the
human, and shown just how cióse the
order of things is to becoming the
disorder of networks. In perfect
Foucauldian fashion, it both produces
new conditions and possibilities, and
also closes them down.
* * *
While the chemical interface has been
largely absent from subsequent
mainstream discussion of cybemetics,
organisms and cyborgs, this has hardly
curtailed its contínuing exploration at
medical, military and street-level. Drugs
are active substances, chemical
assemblages, soft technologies for soft
machines, xenobiotic devices which
interact with the organism to induce
what can be profound changes in its
structure and function. If there is a
populatíon of cyborgs, it Uves with, and
on, these materials.
[1] Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline.
"Cyborgs and Space," in: Chris Hables
Gray (editor). The Cyborg Handbook.
(London and New York: Routledge,
1995) pp. 29-34.
[2] Nick Land. The Thirst for Annihilation.
(London: Routledge, 1992) p. 47.
[3] The entanglement of drugs with war can
even be traced to the vegetable syntheses
of many of the substances at issue in the
war on drugs. There is substantial
evidence to suggest that plants produce
chemical weapons which are fatal to
their primary predators, but have very
different and inadvertent effects on other
passing consumers. The chemical
weapons with which catnip repels the
attacks of certain insects have very
different effects on cats, just as those
produced in the coca leaf have very
different effects on humans. And,
whether they are synthesized in
organisms or laboratories, the human
use of drugs parallels operations at this
vegetable scale.
[4] Paul Virilio. War and Cinema. (London:
Verso, 1992) p. 85.
[5] Thomas De Quincey. Confessions of an
English Opium-Eater. (London: Penguin,
1985) p. 3.
[6] ibid., p. 39.
[7] William Burroughs. The Naked Lunch.
(London: Corgi Books, 1968) p. 85.
[8] As it happens, and at precisely the same
time, opium was also fueling much of
the rapid development which then
encouraged its use: at the height of the
British East India Company's
involvement in the opium trade, the
British Crown was receiving almost half
of its revenue from the drug. Opium was
the cure for an age to which it had
already brought a sense of anease.
[9] Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore.
War and Peace in the Global Village.
(New York: Bantam Books, 1968) p. 77.