The rise of the TikTok Mengele

Paul Virilio on flesh sculpting as eugenicist art

I wrote last week about the “facial feminisation surgery” of TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney. Heavily documented, it culminated in a “face reveal”: a video in which the finished “product” was showcased in a heavily stylised video. I’ve been puzzling, ever since, at an event that felt deeply significant in ways I have struggled to articulate.

I found myself with fresh insight into the meaning of Mulvaney’s face, thanks to this week’s reading: Crepuscular Dawn, a slim volume of dialogue between two late greats of French contemporary thought: the literary critic Sylvère Lotringer and the urbanist Paul Virilio. The book addresses the way technological transformation affects not just our environments but also our sense of time, space, and ourselves; and one passage feels especially prophetic.

In it, Virilio and Lotringer discuss American progressive eugenics and Nazi medical experimentation, as the intellectual genealogy of contemporary experiments in genetic engineering, and especially in the engineering of humans. Speaking of a French artist who used her own body as a canvas, Virilio suggests that “we are on the verge of a transgenic art - an art of beings, an art of the bio-techno, and no longer an art of fixed, pictorial forms.”

He recounts telling the artist that while she was free to undergo surgery as an art project, he was not free to endorse it, saying “She didn’t get it”. Virilio explains that he balks at saying to a would-be sculptor of their own flesh “Go ahead” because “then the torturer has won.” Making art of living bodies opens the door to eugenics, he explains, “because we can’t go back. It’s not a disguise or movie make-up, it’s a real transformation. And this transformation of the body necessarily sets eugenics in motion.” That is: even if the flesh-sculptor volunteers herself as both artist and clay, “still she opens the door for all the Mengeles to come.”

Mulvaney’s “face reveal”, I argued last week, signals the advent of new genres of entertainment, in which human individuals mould their own flesh into potentially infinitely baroque forms for an online audience. Hot on the heels of this event, a few days later Jennifer Weiner, argued in the NYT that Madonna’s recently transformed, radically over-sculpted face is “a brilliant provocation”. Never mind the aesthetic merits of the singer’s obviously OTT surgery, the idea that someone might remodel their own flesh as an avant-garde intervention in public life belongs, too, to the same order of flesh sculpture as discourse.

Drawing Virilio’s insights in this picture offers an unsettling answer to a question that’s bugged me for a little while: what does art look like in the cyborg age? For I’m hardly the first to notice that our existing canonical forms increasingly seem both weightless, and stagnant: endless re-consumption, in a mode I’ve called “Human Centipede culture”.

I’ve written here about one form of net-native creativity I see emerging in response to this predicament: radically distributed dramatisations of narrative or idea, convened via the swarm. But Madonna and Mulvaney signal another development in the new aesthetics: something we might call “eugenicist spectacle”. That is, art forms that use the sculpture of bodies themselves as the principal mode of aesthetic intervention.

We’ve seen glimmers of the phenomenon in the rise of body modification and cosmetic enhancements - as well as in the refactoring of these as schlocky entertainment, for example in the Look At Lolo segments on the ahead-of-its-time 1990s show Eurotrash., or more recently in the emergence of extreme surgery addicts such as Mary Magdalene and Farrah Flawless as figures of internet notoriety.

But in the eugenicist spectacle offered by Mulvaney and Madonna, what’s new is the knowingness: the clear intent to intervene not just for shock but discursive impact. The central point to register is that this is cyborg-native art: a form of sculpture that fulfils Mengele’s dream, in opening out potentially limitless eugenic modes of "discourse” - in the register of flesh itself - concerning the “superhuman”.

This needn’t just be surgical. Rapid advances in genetic engineering technologies, recently turbocharged by US government support, are already inspiring visions of how this could be used expansively: in other words, in registers less inspired by utility than art. And this would indeed be, in Virilio’s words, indeed a realisation of “Mengele’s dream” - that is, “to have biology become an art, and not just an art of biology - a teratology, the art of creating monsters.”

It’s also a development with implications for the conversation about “right wing art” - its nature, modes, aesthetics and patrons - currently afoot in many quarters. In particular: where does such artistic endeavour stand, in relation to an emerging aesthetics of radically plastic flesh? The eugenicist push, after all, appears to be coming not from the Right but from a tech-enamoured progressive mainstream, where radical physical malleability is increasingly normalised as self-actualisation or mass entertainment. And in the wake of this paradigm shift, any amount of human “upgrading” becomes not just possible but aspirational or even morally necessary. If this is the case, then what, if any, should the dissident response be?

My sense is that from the Prometheans in one corner to religiously inflected neo-trads in another, the Right is far from univocal on this front. It’s just a hunch at this stage, but I suspect that both within and beyond the Right, re-opening the question of science, flesh and sculpture from the vantage-point not of technology but aesthetics will do a great deal to clarify where the cultural fissures really lie in post-print politics.