- text by Bojana Kunst
- First published in: Frakcija, 19, March 2001, p. 70 - 82.
Visit kunstbody.wordpress.com for updates.
I.
The history of theatre has always reflected man's longing for a different kind of body – the absent body, a specific image capable of transgressing the body's natural biological and physical limitations. This becomes even more evident if theatre is viewed as an intermediate front connecting bodily images. This interpretation renders the theatrical body as a hybrid between nature and culture, or (in our case) more specifically – a hybrid between the natural and the artificial. Before the concept of modern man appeared in the 17th century, the concept of the theatrical body reflected metaphysics, man’s wish for transcendence, and a unification of micro- and macrocosm. The mechanicistic paradigm which, for the first time in history, systematically revealed physical structure in analogy with the artificial, rendered mechanical structure as a point of the body’s transcendence. Not only did the self-functioning automaton become a body ideal, but the basis and canon of its form. Despite undergoing various modifications, the transparent structure of mechanisms remained a firm criterion in the production of bodily images in the historical periods that followed. In the enlightenment, the body of bourgeois theatre was closely connected with the metaphor of the machine: rigid and rigorously trained, it exerted constant control over sensibility, and became an emotion-generating machine that formed the universally recognizable and predictable language of 18th century bourgeois theatre. The metaphor of the machine was reflected in the specific kind of physical training which, by means of its mechanic psychology, allured to a dialectics between a person's internal and external features. The elaborate system of this dialectics was first shattered in the 19th century. Operativity and predictability, the modes establishing the analogy between the body and machines, were replaced by a unity of opposites, an elusiveness that blurred the boundaries between the living and the non-living, the internal and the external. Predictable causality and operative order gave way to complex, automated systems, immaterial devices. As opposed to the enlightenment, the romanticism and the early 19th century no longer had insight into the operation of machines. Machines no longer evoked the reassuring feeling of predictability – that of a universal order dwelling beneath a machine’s delusive surface. Artificial structure grew into an enormous system characterized by elusiveness and unpredictability, and familiar to people only by effects. At the end of the 19th century, the body was increasingly confronted with various mechanisms that interfered with its ways of operation, transformed its muscular mass, rhythm and energy, demanded an adaptation to a new functionality and forms, and essentially influenced the production of bodily images. The body was to face new challenges – those of energy and dynamic engines.
II.
Energy or physical electricity was dealt with as early as in the enlightenment - in connection with automata, especially in various attempts to define their elusive psyche. However, energy as a proper analogical link between the body and the machine was proposed in the 19th century, with the emergence of new automated industrial machinery and the new outlook upon energy on part of physics. In 1847, Helmholtz published Die Erhaltung der Kraft (Berlin), and Über die Wechselwirkung der Naturkräfte (Königsberg) in 1854; both works deal with the human engine – which is supposed to have the same features as the industrial one. According to Helmholtz, the only difference between forces of nature, machinery and the human being lies in the application and efficiency of the energy transferred in each case. The body is not viewed as analogous, but as essentially identical to the thermodynamic engine, as the engine, nature and the body are governed by the same laws of physics. The characteristics of organic actions are equal to those of work in physics and can thus be measured, graphically presented, and studied in scientific laboratories. The common metaphor of energy through which the fusion of the machine and the body was achieved, was basically influenced by the discovery of the energy preservation law. After having been discussed by Sadi Carnot, Julius Robert Mayer and James Prescott Joule, it was again brought up by Helmholtz in 1854 - as the universal principle of all nature. According to Kuhn, the emergence of this law was primarily influenced by the development of the steamer, Naturphilosophie, and French engineering tradition of the 19th century. Not only did the law fill the 19th century with immense enthusiasm and brought about a general trust into headway; the fact that energy is always preserved (the change of the energy of a system equals the sum of the applied work and heat) almost grew into an ontological presupposition that matter could never be divided from force. Force thus represents the base of all matter; its laws can be observed in all mechanical causes, also in the functioning of man, nature, and the body. »The discovery of energy as the essential element of all experiences – organic or inorganic, virtually no longer differentiates between society and nature. Society fuses with the image of nature, a phenomenon driven by Promethean energy ...« The laws governing the engine are applied to the human body which, interacting with mechanical structures, should be governed by the same laws and production procedures as industrial machines. Moreover, machinery brings up the question whether living beings are indeed homeostatic, dependent on themselves - on their energy usage and supply.
Quite logically, energy and power became the fundamental scientific syntagms about man in the 19th century. The body was electrified and magnetized on a large scale, with the waving and pulsation of its nerve currents deftly measured. It was subjected to calculations and tested as to its efficiency, with the discoveries essentially influencing both the theory of the modern working body and new ways of bodily representation. As states Rabinbach, between 1870 and 1880, the problem of energy preservation in the human body was constantly dealt with in scientific magazines, culminating in the 1887 definition of a living organism as »a machine which, generating heat, succumbs to the universal thermodynamic equivalence«. Not only did force and energy reign the philosophical realm, but that of psychology as well. This is evident from the psychological research and definitions of neurasthenia, moral/physical exhaustion and the omnipresent physical and mental problem of the second half of the 19th century - fatigue, a phenomenon that alluded to a concerning drawback of the body as compared with the idealized efficiency of the engine.
The operation and energetic self-regulation of industrial machinery was stated as a kind of model of the universe, which, connecting matter, energy and movement, was interpreted as a reservoir of self-working power. »The body, the steamer and the universe are linked by means of an unbreakable chain of energy.« It was primarily industrial theorists (Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil du Bois – Reymond, Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Ostwald) that combined these theories with those of the working body, economics and the exchange between mechanical and human engines. Such views led to several ground-breaking changes in the imageology of the body and the production of bodily images, reaching deep into the 20th century – also into the avant-garde and several most important movements and theatre reforms of the early 20th century. Like mechanisms, the body was no longer explored and rendered as predictable; it became a body of forces, capable of endless transformation and conversion. It was no longer an antropomorphical body, but a hot and dynamic industrial body exhibiting the forceful dynamism not alien to the modern concept of the elusiveness of space and time. It turned into a front of invisible forces and invisible kinetics, with its form becoming elusive and devoid of epidermal surface – the border dividing it from the rest of the world. The transparency of the modern body was no longer that of mechanic operativity, but that of elusive structure, invisible flows and pulsating energy. Science (medicine, physics) and art of the second half of the 19th century introduced radical changes in bodily representation. A number of intermediate devices for the observation of the human body were invented, all with the aim to reveal the body's invisible internal movement, rhythm, lines of force, and the preservation/loss of energy. To name only a few of such instruments: kimograph for pressure (Ludwig, 1847), miograph for the strength and duration of muscular impulses (Hemholtz, 1849), sphygmograph for pulse (Marey, 1860) , followed by improved variants of kardiograph, pneumograph and thermograph. Devised to deal with the problem of fatigue were calorimeter (Rubner, 1889), ergograph for measuring muscular fatigue (Mosso, 1891), and aesthesiometer (Griesbach). At the end of the 19th century, the first method of invisible penetration into the body was invented; shining through bone, X-rays added a new perspective to the body's transparency and fascinated avant-garde artists: "The X-Ray Picture about which the Futurists spoke are among the most outstanding space-time examples on the static plane. They give a transparent view of an opaque solid, the outside and inside of the structure. The passion for transparencies is one of the most spectacular features of our time. We might say, with pardonable enthusiasm, that structure becomes transparency and transparency manifests structure." The body became describable, specified as to its individuality, transparent, and a diverse inner chronology of its rhythms captured with the invisible, penetrating gaze of X-rays. It became nothing less and nothing more than an utterly exposed theatre of movement, with its transparency capturable by means of individual graphic or rontgen spectra. These images were quite similar to contemporary digitalized and abstract body matrixes; their (at first glance) statistic neutrality finally liberated them from the rigid hierarchical and moral admixture in anatomical etchings, the fascination of the enlightenment.
"We seem to have been transversing an immense gallery of mechanisms of greatly varied combinations ... but everything here was mysterious in its immobility. The shift from organic structure to dynamics and the "interplay of organs" was a shift to mobility and to "motor functions". This view towards »old age« mechanisms was expressed by Etienne Julius Marey, physicist, physiologist, cardiologist, student of hydraulics, and pioneer of medicine measurements, aviation, photography and film. Marey invented a number of instruments for graphic description of the body, believing that human movement could be decomposed by means of them. His experiments influenced Marcel Duchamp, Henry Bergson, theorists of the working body (Frank Gilberth), and film beginners. Convinced that »animal organisms do not differ from machines, except that the latter are more efficient« , Marey carried out a number of experiments in order to analyse the moving substance of the body, and establish the economy and laws of its movement. In Marey’s opinion, this kinetic reality was closely linked with that of space and time. More even, Marey already attempted to measure and determine the laws of inner, psychological time - the fluid current which was soon to receive wide attention. Bergson's philosophy introduced the concept of duration (durée), essentially influencing the art of the early 20th century. It is important to note that, despite the mechanicistic principle that governed Marey’s studies of movement and its relation to space and time, the subject of his research no longer was a mechanicistic (rational) moving body, but a modern energetic one - a kinetic flow Marey aimed to decompose and depict by means of chronophotography. The new method showed and measured the body's movement in time intervals invisible to the naked eye. Chronophotography could in fact be called a »time microscope«, enabling the exploration of the body's mobility and efficiency, as well as the analysis of the »development and use of muscular energy in education, military gymnastics, hand manufacture, sports etc.« It is therefore not unusual that Italian futurists considered Marey's images a proof of the unreality of an immovable body, with the method itself employed in Anton Bragaglia's Fotodinamismo futurista (1913), arguably one of the first works of aesthetic chronophotography. Marey was also praised by Umberto Boccaccio – as the man who united the concepts of space and time. According to Rabinbach, in his effort to throw light upon the movement invisible to the human eye, Marey entered the vocabulary of modern art. His scientific work mirrored the way in which new scientific analyses of the 19th century, concepts of thermodynamic machinery, and altered views upon space and time radically changed the bodily representation in scientific, social and cultural fields.
III.
The kinetic body of the early 20th century mirrored complex relations between the body and the modern energetic engine. It also initiated a series of new perceptions of the body. The moving, dynamic, kinetic, reformed body of the avant-garde and early contemporary dance intertwined contemporary engineering, dynamic automatization, and new views of physics upon nature, energy, space and time. The theatrical body of that period was strongly connected with energy. More even, the concept of energy corresponded to another modern demand: that for abstraction. In other words, inscribed deep into the autonomy of the avant-garde body which no longer succumbed to the demands of figure, language, space, and time, were the kinetics and elusiveness of the modern engine. Considering the demand of contemporary dance for a natural body, it may initially seem that, at the beginning of the century with its movement reforms, abstraction, and the lightness of the aerial body, we are suddenly confronted with a liberation of the body and a return to its nature unobnoxious to any kind of dynamic and hierarchical laws, it is actually here, in the depths of an autonomous body, that we collide with the notion of the energy-powered engine. The body of the early 20th century reveals a strong bond between the concepts of the natural and the artificial, as well as the fact that every representation of the body is inevitably a kind of production of the connections between these two poles. At the same time, the body of that time mercilessly reveals the ideological production exerted by the movement reforms upon the »light-weight« body – a concept which, in its very essence, is deeply connected with the rationalization and operationalization of modern automated systems as well as with the hierarchy of energy calculations and utilization.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the body’s representational frame was heavily influenced by energy and its numerous manifestations. In the present day, however, an entirely different model of the body has prevailed. In the early 20th century, it was referred to by the English poet T.S. Eliot; in an anecdote about his Christmas dinner with Robert Wiener, he described the father of cybernetics as a »vegetarian and the lightest eater I have ever seen.« The quote excellently summons the image of the contemporary body. Strikingly different from the energy-driven body of the modernism, it seems as if taken over by entropy - at least at first sight. It no longer corresponds to the weak modern body connected with nature, engines, and the cosmos, nor is it an autonomous and at the same time dependent part of the omnipresent flow of energy and dynamism. Worse even, the entire 20th century displays a gradual disappearance or an entrophy of the body. Once an energy component connected with nature, a central, intermediating point between nature and culture, between the natural and the artificial, the body of the 20th century (also due to the dreadful experience of war dynamisms) is gradually transmuted into a cognitive, discoursive, digital net. It is a conglomerate of signs, binary codes and diffused digital matrixes. A front, as states Elisabeth Grosz, »organically/biologically/naturally incomplete: it is indeterminate, amorphous, a series of unco-ordinated potentialities which require social triggering, ordering and long-term administration«. Energy remains a metaphor of an (elusive) totality that somehow manages to preserve the relation between the inside and the outside. The body has retained a (flexible) epidermis and moves in space, although its limits can only be embraced in an indirect fashion (by means of various instruments). The weak body of the matrix and binary codes no longer succumbs to laws of physics, but primarily to administrative and social regulation, statistics, and cognitive enthusiasm. For the first time, its limits have been questioned – sexual, social, genetic, those of identity and representation. The body’s severing from nature and the engine, with energy remaining the last trace of link with them, has made it a problematic field, opening, however, infinite possibilities for the future - one that will inevitably lead to a specific hybrid symbiosis of the body with the artificial. Energy indeed introduces a free moving and signifying body (movement reforms, contemporary dance, avant-garde theatre), but nevertheless excludes the possibility of hybrids. Interestingly, it is in this aversion to hibridity that the totalitarity of the energy concept comes to light; producing the body of movement reforms at the beginning of the century, energy also intertwined it with the totalitarian body of ideology. Today, when energy has been replaced with the omnipresence of statistics and binary codes, hybrids are indeed a possibility, problematizing, however, our link with nature: who sets boundaries and why are they placed as they are? This will remain the fundamental question pertaining to the body in our contemporary world, and a burning issue whenever we will attempt to deal with the autonomy of the body’s energy.