Holy Fire: The Medical Institution, Body & Identity
Holy Fire takes
place a century from now, in a future where life-extension treatments
are getting increasingly commonplace and efficient. The main
protagonist, Mia Ziemann, was born in 2001 is a 94 years
old woman, who is living in a world dominated by the biomedicine
industry and ruled by a global gerontocratic elite, the so called
polity. The medical records are publicly available on the net and people
are qualified for the better medical procedures by this
data. In the late 21st century of Mia’s world, different forms of
life-extension exists as a common medical technique. Mia becomes
qualified for a new technology that will turn her body into a
twenty-year old’s. With her body that is completely restructured
and search for a new identity, she travels to Europe where the story
unfolds.
Research for
life extension, mind uploading, 3d printed organs are becoming a daily
subject in our times. In the book, the patients invest money for decades
in biomedical companies to receive life extension.
A huge flow of money is tied up in this investment that the global
economy is long-term stable. Housekeepers for the elderly double as
government spies. Emergent diseases require constant sterilization of
clothes and utensils, and combating with friendly microbial
flora. Dogs have implanted computers for intelligence so they may
speak and act as servants. Net access businesses keep a backlog of old
equipment to access ancient data and protocols.
The government is directly informed by the the medical institution which
makes all the behavior and mostly misbehaviors of the people, public
and this has direct political, economic and social reflection. Together
with something so powerful as ‘public opinion’ the pressure exerted on
the individual is immense. These institutional
relations and power of the discursive practices becomes
visible in the effects of these “truths”: the better the people behave,
the better the medical treatment is entitled to and if they can not
prove themselves to be responsible, careful, and far-sighted in how they
take care of their body, then nobody will
consider them to be trustworthy in other areas, particularly in career.
Mia’s new body is reconstructed in
such a way that it belongs both to the realm of culture and to the
realm of nature or better to the realm of symbolic meaning and to
materiality, it possible to say that Sterling skirts the
liability of a dualistic logic inherent in of the body theories .
Holy Fire offers an intriguing commentary of the idea of the body as
border
case. Mia’s body is shown at once to belong to culture and nature, both
to the plane of power and to the realm of transgression.
The
connection between body and identity – since Mia feels like a completely
new person and even calls herself Maya after her flight and recognizes
the ‘Mia thing’ as calm and really old, somewhere
inside herself. A detailed analysis of the description of Mia’s medical
procedure will prove very noteworthy, as it abounds with imagery taken
from pregnancy and birth – another link between the natural process of
childbearing and the technological process
of life-extension.
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