- text by Bojana Kunst
- First published in: Performance Research 4(2), pp.47-51; Copyright: Taylor & Francis Ltd, 1999
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Comparing the theoretical findings of eminent contemporary artists and philosophers dealing with the interaction between the body and technology, we discover that their theories about the body have a lot in common. In his well-known statement about the so-called obsolete body, Stelarc reduces it to "fractional meat", a "split body" the functions of which should be revalued -beyond the means of physiology. In his experiments, his own body is reduced to an object with a strictly operative function, a specimen subjected to manipulation and remodeling to acquire higher efficiency and, in the end, reach its final transformation - the abolition. Equally famous and classic nowadays is Willam Gibson and his statement about the body as "meat", or the robotic philosopher Hans Moravec and his vision of a future in which people will live as immortal bodiless digital entities. In one of his essays, the French sociologist Jean Billard talks about "the end of the unique phenomenon called the body" _; he states that the body's location is radically changing, with the traditional locations - "the body, landscape and time" - gradually disappearing from this function.The philosopher Paul Virilo denotes the modern body as invalid, prothetic. To be able to function properly, the body requires more and more high-tech protheses, essentially different from the merely complementary mechanical protheses of industrial times; the new protheses deeply influence the body's way of operation and fuse with its biological functions. To sum it up - in relation to technology, the body initially seems like a field which has to be transcended, transformed, "re-engineered" according to Stelarc. Due to human longing for disembodied intelligence, the body seems to be doomed to ruthless ultimate entropy which indeed is rapidly increasing with modern technological development. The statement of the Geman theorist Harmut Winkler saying that, nowadays, the body enters theory (we can also add - art) as a scandal, is therefore not surprising. On the one side, we are - in addition to the developing technology and science - subversively confronted with the alleged body's uselessness; offered new biology and genetics, we shockingly witness the banal inefficiency of the body which can not compete with the abstract physicalness of the machine. Compared to computers with internet access, our bodies may indeed seem rather poor; during high-speed voyages through virtual space, the body becomes rigid, immovable, the eyes suffer and so does the spine). But also a scandal in another, much deeper - and fatal sense: in addition to the controversies of the body's usefulness, often accompanied by the awareness of the increasing entropy (mentioned as early as in Descartes' division between body and soul), man is also confronted with obsessed exposition of the body's presence - and traditional physical limitations such as space and time have become unimportant in this case. We are confronted with the ecstatic praise to dissected, blank bodies - regarded as illusory wholes (even identities!) only by the aesthetics of everyday life (in terms of nicely shaped figures, muscles and buttocks). But this kind of praise - as opposed to advocates of cyberculture and cyberbodies - does not mean that the body is in fact disappearing. Quite the contrary, its presence is very noticeable; it is indeed evasive, dispersed, impossible to be reflected by discourse or moulded in any way (in fact, every attempt to think of it as a totality is doomed to failure) - but nevertheless, it is quite strong. Even when thinking, says Leotard, our phenomenological, mortal, perceptive bodies are the only analogue for thinking a complexity of thought; they exist as experiences, fragments, analogies, dissected particles, organless bodies, incisions, trace, or games. The philosophy claiming the opposite should productively be viewed as a metaphore for what is happening with the body nowadays: it is becoming a transformer of language, influencing thought and breaking forms. It is owing to the scandal of its presence that many traditional ways of thinking - and many traditional ways of presentation and exposition of the body have been overcome. The body always remains as the final stop condition, the last territory we keep coming back to, the final frontier - despite the fact that it has been dissected and derealized. It is present as a link we will never be able to grasp totally, as an earthly impediment to our ecstatic walking on the edge of the conceivable. The longing to replace it with dissected thought, i.e. reason, has continuously been present from as early as Descartes' time - resulting in ecstatic exclamations of the advocates of reason and artificial bodies. But this phenomenon has and will not erase the body as it is; it will, however, deeply and decisively influence its presence: after all, the impossible is becoming possible.
The most paradigmatic and interesting illustrative example seems to be the performing body. Although the body is the primary means of theatrical display and address, theatre has always contained propositions that the body is in fact redundant, or that it should be transformed and replaced in order to achieve perfect theatrical representation. This is also one of the inherent paradoxes of theatre as an artistic form; the aesthetics of the performing body has continuously been haunted by the ideal of the impossible body - one capable of overcoming physical and biological limitations, of conquering gravity (ballet), capable of endless repetition, immortal, radiant with absolute grace (Kleist), flawless and perfectly reliable, functional, the ultimate performer (Meyerhold). In its very essence, the concept of the performing body is basically artificial - with its presence essentially different from the everyday physical presence. The longing for the impossible body in theatrical representation contains an ontological link to artificial replacement: in fact, every new theatre paradigm has introduced its own concept of replacement, representational strategies and an entire network of new theatrical signs, sometimes covered with the illusion of mimesis (naturalism), sometimes with enthusiastic emphasis on artificiality (avant-garde). In the times when the artificial still belonged to mystic world and theatre had the function of intervening between man and god, perfect bodies were suspended above the stage (deus ex machina). In the age of the Enlightenment, when the body was "disclosed" as a machine without secrets, the machine became a metaphore for the complexity of emotional functioning -and the performing body a machine for producing emotions (Diderot). When individual machines connected into the abstract system of functional automatisation, bodies on the stage were reduced to abstract conglomerations, constructivist and abstract forms par excellence (avant-garde). From the citizentry theatre onwards, the concept of the impossible body begins to feed on utopian ideas brought by the introduction of technology - and the impossible body ceases to be a phenomenon from the heavenly spheres. With the aid of the developing technological possibilities and strategies, it is gradually turning into a perfectly feasible category. The futuristic director Renato Depero stated his demand for a new body in the following way: "a decomposition and deformation of the figure, possibly undergoing final transformation: for example, a ballerina dancing with increasing speed until she transforms into a blossoming whirlpool" _. The search for a physical form that will fulfil the criteria of perfect theatrical representation thus proves to be the well-known longing for the artificial, impossible presence of the body; only a substituted, artificial body would be able to grasp the original language of theatre. Nevertheless, in theatrical representation, the body has always been able to offer (and bargain with) its presence - in the exchange for a successful image, perfect form and an epidermis capable of constant transformation.
The longing of theatre for a perfect body can also be understood as a part of the longing for an ideal body; the tension between the imperfection of one's actual body and the perfection of the idealized (impossible) one has determined and directed every aesthetic representation of the body throughout the history of art. In this sense, art represents a psychoanalytic aid throughout the history of mankind, soothing our inborn sorrow that "we shall never completely master nature; and our bodily organism, itself a part of that nature, will always remain a transient structure with a limited capacity for adaptation and achievement."_ If the theory is tenable and the relation between the ideal and real body has been the essential relation determining the aesthetic representation of the body throughout history, then, at the end of the second millennium, we actually seem confronted with none other than impossible bodies - evasive artificial structures, with their real bodies becoming unnecessary and obsolete. "If you can make a machine that contains the contents of your mind, then the machine is you. The hell with the rest of your physical body, it's not very interesting. Now the machine can last forever. Even if it doesn't last forever, you can always dump onto tape and make backups, then load it upd on some other machine if the first one breaks...Everyone would like to be immortal...I'm afraid, unfortunately, that I am the last generation to die..."_ In the excitement about the possibility of artificial bodies, a sparkling image of the body comes to mind which no longer would succumb to the mortality of nature, and to natural reproduction as the only possibility for our bodies to live on; capable of endless replications of conscience, it would finally achieve immortality. It would be the kind of body succumbing neither to time nor physical space, not a biological system but an artificial net - covered with transparent epidermis under which just any, not only organic content, may be hidden.This kind of anticipation and the growing probability for it to actually come true, however, initiated the disappearing of the original tension (and relation) between the real and ideal body - the fundament on which every bodily representation throughout the history of art was based so far.
The disappearing of this relationship could be one of the chief reasons for the modern ecstatic state I mentioned. We have in fact become confronted with the same kind of body that seemed so tragically unreachable throughout the history of art. Let us consider the case of Antonine Artaud: the old utopian wish to work without a body fatally marked the great author and his personal tragedy. He could not know, however, that in somewhat over half a century this utopian wish will become something quite normal. Thus, one of the last Artaud's appearances in the Vieux Colombier Theatre was dedicated to the act of confronting face to face his own fantasy of disarticulated, dissected body, body as the point of shifting, separation and constant fluidity which is the pure presence and body without organs. For him, this wish was connected with the fundamental existential experience, with problems linking body to existence and the weight of difference which its substance cannot bear. For the aesthetic strategies of high technologies, this wish is the question of technique and search for a new methodology, where the body itself is not the carrier of existential experiences, but an extensible epidermal form where the endless incision is possible and disengaged in the creating of virtual bodies. On the one side, his traumatically unreachable phantasm about the disarticulated and dissected body by means of high, digital technology has become a business of everyday adrenalin pursuit (computer games etc.); on the other, it has imposed totally new challenges upon technological creators as well. "Digital technology in blurring the dividing line between reality and imagination, and consequently between science and art, gives the artists of today the world-creating role of which avant-garde artists have been dreaming since the Romantics."
Impossible bodies gradually come to prevail over our everyday ones; to put it differently, "machines became disturbingly alive" (Donna Harraway). Furthermore, every confrontation with modern reality seems to grow into a confrontation with the kind of bodily presence deeply inherent in theatre - which, as mentioned earlier, has always longed for the transformation and replacement of the physical. We all come to think from time to time that our confrontation with reality should constantly contain all the characteristics of a perfect theatrical acts (catharsis). The impossible body makes an ideal inhabitant of such ecstatic worlds; it is therefore not coincidental that some theorists (Sally Jane Norman) see the theatrical representational models of the body (and personality) as cognitive models for new virtual technologies - and present the theatrical field as the one which has, within its medium, explored and developed virtual modes of existence throughout the history of art. The statements about obsolete bodies should not be regarded only as a consequence of the wish of their transcendence by technology (thought, soul, reason), in the manner the final stage of dualism the chief aim of which could be something like the Borg collective in SF. They should also be viewed as hidden traumas and wishes of the body when it is confronted with representation, the body/presence relationship and the image which its presence should reflect. Today, the use of technology and co-operation beween art and science offer undreamed-of possibilities of performance, the body evolving into a space of diverse locations and physiologies, overcoming the limitations of space and time. It is growing independent of both epidermis and thought. It is becoming evolving a central space of different technologies which it will have to live with in a certain symbiosis (genetic engineering, nanotechnology, biogenetics). Modern aesthetic strategies of the representation of the body are thus marked by speed and endless interactivity which confronts us with the possibility to overcome the body's traditional biological and physical limitations; we have never before been confronted with a more real possibility of the impossible body. As a consequence of the co-operation between the art of the possible, high technology and aesthetic imagination, it now seems that the body needs reconstruction and engineering, it seems obsolete. By means of new representational strategies developed by the co-operation between science and art, the body can be transformed into the art of the possible, into simulacra and digital entities defined by the undefinable relation between time, space and its epidermal surface/elusive presence. Direct application of technological performativity into bodily representation and the transformation of physical form has influences physical techniques and at sets new models of physical behaviour/training. Furthermore, with the ecstatic applauding to the feasibility of impossible bodies, the relation between the body's presence and its representation has been turned upside down. There is nothing else left but the mere presence; it represents the image, the mirror and the fragment: no more doubles (Bauillard) or longing, nothing but the constant elusive presence. "The body space is neither full, nor empty, there is no outside nor inside, any more that there are no parts, no totality, no functions, no finality."
It thus seems that we have entered the time when the bargaining with the bodily presence in exchange for successful images and perfect forms - which we could observe throughout the history of art - is at its peak. The same goes for its realization. High technology offers amazing possibilities; the fusion of reality and imagination embodies our longing for a perfect image chiefly as adrenalin pastime - as virtual games, amusement parks, beautiful bodies of Hollywood industry. What are the consequences of the disappearing border between the ideal and real body for theatre and art in general? Given the feasibility of the impossible and the possibility for Kleist's visionary dreams to come true, has art been defeated by everyday popular possibilities of ideal bodies? Has it been defeated by virtual technology? I don't think these are the right questions asked and that they are merely rhetorical.
The thing that is changing is primarily the status of the body as an object which can no more be grasped as a totality, depicted by discourse, form, representation, or be caught into the mirror to show us the reflection of Apollo. Interactive technologies and remote control are changing the body's relations to space and time, and the body has long lost its secrets. It is gradually becoming an information entity; it is no longer the performer of sign networks, a machine for producing emotions (Diderot), or a formal visual construction (avant-garde, visual theatre). It might acquire the status of an interface, a tool which will visually transgress different media and spaces by means of a sybiosis with robots or mechanic interfaces (Stelarc, Marcel.li). It might only acquire the status of meat operated on in the symbiosis with medical technology (Orlane). A status of a machine connected with other machines vegetating on the border between life and death (Slovenian performer Ive Tabar). It si not necessary that the body should be full and connected with thought anymore. In its contact with high technology and modern science, the body is gradually acquiring the status of the final territory, the territory of pure here and now, with an elusive presence and absence. It has become a moving place of various locations and psychologies - its presence mockingly changing countless different epiderms and entities. The art and science have united in the process, changing into arts of the possible; their objects have a similar ontological status - of simulacra, beings without referential objects. Art and theatre face countless new possibilities and challenges. Co-operating in most eminent technological performances, body engineering is a reflection of digital environment - a place rejecting physical and biological limitations, the field of the invisible, a self-regulating chaotic structure where we no longer have the insight into the operation and causal logic; a place where structure has become independent and the image fused with presence.
What we should critically focus on in the future, however, are bodies as a individual subject. In this field, art can still address us very powerfully in the sense of Heidegger's proposition that "in art, the truth will come to light" and that art it is not merely an ontological holiday resort (Danto); we can agree that art is different from commonplace adrenalin pursuits. The speed and infinite interactivity of modern aesthetic strategies do in fact confront us with the possibility of overcoming the biological and physical limitations of our bodies, and this possibilities have never been as real as it is now; on the other hand, the body has never before been as rigid as today. It is true that it has become normal to do things without the body as it has become almost impossible to differentiate between the body and its image - and bodies are gradually turning into epidermal sacks. But it is also true that it has never been so hard to define the body as a place for subjectivity, it has never been so hard to define the body as my body, as a place for my identity. At this point, the body must go on stage as a scandal and display the weight of its presence; evasive, ecstatic and happy as it may seem in endless digital space, the presence is fatally stigmatized by the enormous role of wanted but evasive identity. Today, when it has become normal to do things without the body, the basic conflict with the body remains unresolved, despite the amazing abilities of virtual and simulated existence; the body can still fatally mark our personal tragedy, pleasure, illness or destiny.
REFERENCES:
- Baudrillard, Jean (1981) Simulacres et simulation, paris: Edition Galilee.
- Depero, Fortunato (1992) 'Notes on Theatre', Maska (April-May).
- Freud, Sigmund (1961) Civilization and Its Discontents, London: Hogarth Press.
- Lyotard, jean (1998) The Inhuman, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
- de Mul, Jos (1997) 'Networked Identities' in Proceedings Seventh International Symposium on Electonic ART, ed. Michael B. Roetto, Rotterdam 1997, 11-16.
- Nancy, Jean Luc (1992) Corpus, Paris: Fayard.
- Sussman, Gerald Jay (1991) in Biosphere politics: A New Consciousness for a New Century, ed. Jeremy Rifkin, New York:Crown.