Stelarc and the Body
It’s only a problem if you maintain these very distinct boundaries, if you make these distinctions—and I don’t. (Stelarc, ctd in Zylinska and Hall, ‘Probings’, 120)
Hence the vain debate, as I watched it unfold, between those who wanted a metaphysical adventure and those who preferred a technical performance: certainly both are at stake, one inside the other. (Nancy, Corpus, 162)
You may say, it is impossible for a man to become like the Machine. And I would reply, that only the smallest mind strives to comprehend its limits.
— Fabricator Kane in Dark Adeptus (19)
The process of opening up the body can be described from at least the following two perspectives. First, it is a theoretical opening, in the sense that ‘developments in contemporary theory have radically transformed our understanding of what it is to “be human”’ (Bradley and Armand, ‘Thinking’, 3). Secondly, and quite characteristically for Stelarc, this theoretical or conceptual ‘opening’ is accompanied by a more acute, physiological opening of the body (not simply the body-concept, as it were, but also the body-flesh) and its ‘invasion’, ‘augmentation’ and ‘extension’ (see Stelarc, ‘Zombies’)—a penetration of its skin (typically in the suspension events dating from the early 1986 Remote Control Suspensions to the newest 2012 Ear on Arm Suspensions in Melbourne),1 a fragmentation of its autonomy (for example in Internet performances such as Ping Body, Involuntary Body/Third Hand and Fractal Flesh) and a rearrangement of its biological structures (typically Third Hand, Extra Ear, Stomach Sculpture and, perhaps most shockingly, Blender). Thanks to their common close-relatedness to technology and the technological, both of these approaches—the theoretical-deconstructive operation on the body-concept and the practical-extensive work on the body-flesh—can be treated as complementary within performance practice. Stelarc’s performances, moreover, ‘deconstruct’ the idea of physical reality in a theoretical movement of ‘exteriorisation’, a shift in focus in the questioning of the body. This theoretical movement, which can be schematised as a movement from the inside to the outside, from the body-complete to ‘body+prosthesis’, marks the development of the conditions under which ‘body-questions’ may be asked in the first place. Let’s start with the basic concepts, then, and ask, What is the nature of the body as it manifests itself within Stelarc’s performances?
I
The Third Hand, Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya (1980). Photographer: Simon Hunter © Stelarc
In his symposium paper entitled ‘Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence’, Stelarc declares that ‘it is time to question whether a bipedal, breathing body with binocular vision and a 1,400-cc brain is an adequate biological form’ (591). Any ‘questioning’ of the body ‘defined’ in this way occurs for Stelarc first of all in showing/performing the blurriness of the body’s limits. In a similar vein, Lisa Blackman, in her discussion of ‘current reformulations of the body’, suggests that,
we are confronted with new ways of making and re-making bodies. The singular, bounded, carbon-based body is being replaced by the proliferation and emergence of technologies and practices which enable enhancement, alternation and invention of new bodies. Some appear mundane and have become largely accepted ways of living and acting upon ourselves and others. These include practices of body modification and enhancement such as cosmetic surgery, gender reassignment surgery and in vitro fertilisation. The more far reaching are biotechnological practices which are challenging the concept of what we understand life, the natural and humanness to mean. (Body, 2)
Significantly, this shift of focus, this ‘new way of making and re-making bodies’ opened by the recent emergence of body-altering technologies, can be described as a shift from the ‘inside’ to the ‘outside’, from the body (or the idea of the body) per se, to the body plus something else. Indeed, what is common to all of Stelarc’s performances is his treatment of the body as what we might call the body-PLUS. By this PLUS we refer to what Stelarc so often calls a ‘prosthesis’—‘pro-thesis, i.e., an addition; what-is-placed-in-front-of’ (Bradley and Armand, ‘Thinking’, 2)—or a ‘prosthetic body’, a body enhanced or supplemented by something that would ‘normally’ or ‘traditionally’ be referred to as an external object: a technological device, a suspension apparatus, an artificial bodily anomaly, etc. These ‘external objects’ are, in a typical Stelarc performance, in some way or another closely related to the body. Deploying such an ‘extended concept of the corporeal ... always in relation to a very present physicality’ (Scheer, ‘Experiments’, 93), Stelarc’s idea of the body can be understood in the first place as relational, in the sense that it confronts the body, in a new or unexpected way, with some non-body, some (at least seemingly) external object. From this perspective, the ‘quality’ of the body lies precisely in this relational character, in its prosthetic nature. As Stelarc himself puts it:
For me the body has always been a prosthetic body. Ever since we evolved as hominids and developed bipedal locomotion, two limbs became manipulators. We have become creatures that construct tools, artefacts and machines. We’ve always been augmented by our instruments, our technologies. Technology is what constructs our humanity; the trajectory of technology is what has propelled human developments. I’ve never seen the body as purely biological, so to consider technology as a kind of alien ‘other’ that happens upon us at the end of the millennium is rather simplistic. (ctd in Zylinska and Hall, ‘Probings’, 114)2
This being said, we may notice that the prosthetic ‘quality’ of the body does not directly help us much in answering our initial question—determining positively what the body is. Instead, it may be argued that it represents a theoretical ‘strategy’ for opening up the possibility of placing the body on the same (ontological) level as the prosthesis and thereby, of course, legitimising the act of theorising the ‘prosthesis’ as a valid way of arriving at a ‘description’ of the body. Again, Stelarc’s prosthetic ‘experimentation’ does not provide us with a definition as such of what the body ‘is’—but that in any case is not the main point. Instead, Stelarc shifts the focus of questioning to consider what things or objects (prostheses) may be accepted today as being ‘natural’ parts of the body—keeping in mind that considering technology as a kind of ‘alien’ ‘other’ has now become ‘simplistic’. Talking about the body is thus not a question of giving answers, but rather a matter of asking questions. The ‘question’ of what once used to be ‘the essence’ of the body is in Stelarc’s discourse replaced by the question of its limits and its pro-stethic, ‘what-is-placed-in-front-of’ character. A quest to determine the nature of the body (i.e. a quest for a positive ‘definition’) becomes a quest to determine the limits between body and environment, to determine what is not body, or what cannot already be understood as its potential prosthesis (i.e. a quest for a negative ‘definition’). As we shall see, this ‘line’ does not represent a closure but a border that is to be constantly crossed and re-drawn.
II
The difficulties of establishing the line between body and environment are in Stelarc’s performances approached already at the most fundamental, physiological level, through the questioning of the body-physical’s ‘closed’ character. As a part of this questioning, Stelarc systematically points out the dubious quality of human skin as body’s most natural limit—most obviously in his ongoing interest in the suspension events and more generally in other performances where technology enters the body by penetrating its surface:
Remote Suspension © Stelarc
Discussing this interest in the porosity of skin, as explored in such works as Stomach Sculpture, Stelarc writes:
As surface, skin was once the beginning of the world and simultaneously the boundary of the self. But now stretched, pierced and penetrated by technology, the skin is no longer the smooth and sensuous surface of a site or a screen. Skin no longer signifies closure. The rupture of surface and skin means an erasure of inner and outer. (‘Zombies & Cyborgs’)
Stelarc’s stretching/penetration of skin points out the (relative) ease with which the coherence of one’s body may be doubted (and along with it the ‘outside/inside’ distinction). However debatable the results of such suspensions may appear,3 it should be noted that skin is not the only conventional limit to the body; the crises of corporeal boundaries take other forms. Jean-Luc Nancy, for example, in his essay ‘The Intruder’ (see Corpus), suggests a definition of the body based on an individual immunity. This ‘immunitary identity’, or more precisely, its compromising under the influence of imuno-suppressive factors, may be seen to correspond to Stelarc’s experiments with bodily boundaries, resulting in a state by which the ‘“I” always finds itself squeezed tightly in a wedge of technical possibilities’ (Nancy, Corpus, 162).
III
The missing criteria for delineating the body/prosthesis distinction may yet suggest that the difficulty in determining any ‘satisfactory’ answers may first of all stem from an inability to ask the right questions, or, to be more specific, to ask questions that do not presuppose what Stelarc often calls ‘Cartesian, Platonic or Freudian’ answers:
Our language tends to reinforce Platonic, Cartesian and Freudian constructs of internal relationships, of essences, of egos. I think we have to get away from these notions and try to construct a body that is not simplistically a split mind and brain. (Ctd in Zylinska and Hall, ‘Probings’, 121)
Stelarc’s performances can thus be understood as questioning certain idealistic theories of the body, or ‘body-concepts’. To that extent, the attempt to overcome ‘Plato, Descartes and Freud’ might also be seen as an attempt to liberate what we call ‘man’ or ‘human’ from the dualities these theories presuppose. From the perspective provided by Stelarc’s work, these idealistic theories are the cause of divisions or dualisms that are no longer sustainable or acceptable, especially in view of the technological challenges posed to humanity. As Stelarc argues:
Of course, language makes it difficult to speak without referring to an ‘I’. But when this body speaks as an ‘I’, it understands that the notion ‘I’ in the English language is a simplification of a much more complex relationship between bodies, between the body and its culture and its institutions, between the body and its technologies. (Ibid.)
Discussing the theoretical implications of the concept of the body, it seems possible that Stelarc attempts something that might be described as a double movement:
(1) A shift from the qualitative-normative distinctions/dualities that a specific set of authors (especially Plato and Descartes), a set that is understood by Stelarc as representative of a certain no longer sustainable metaphysical tradition, seems to establish.
This shift is, however, immediately followed by a second move:
(2) The replacement of these qualitative distinctions by a set of quantitative, or horizontal relations. These ‘new’ relations seem to promise a more accurate (paradoxically because more open and dynamic) way of description, more adequate to the claim or understanding that ‘the ontological boundaries between the human and the technological constantly need to be redrawn’ (Bradley and Armand, ‘Thinking’, 3).
In other words, the (1) ‘deconstruction’, as Louis Armand puts it, of the ‘ideological discourses of “man”’ that lack ‘any sustainable claim upon a more foundational metaphysics’, has led recently to a ‘crisis’ (‘Technics’, 46), which in this scheme is immediately followed by a (2) ‘construction’ of a body that would more efficiently cope with ‘the technological terrain it has created’ (ctd in Zylinska and Hall, ‘Probings’, 122) and/or the extraterrestrial destiny its ‘ill-equipment’ faces (see Stelarc, ‘Prosthetics’). However, this process of construction should not be understood as creating simply another totalising ‘duality’. The opposite being true, it should be seen as establishing a complex multiplicity of ‘more and more feedback loops between the body and other bodies and its environment, whether technological, cultural, social or whatever’, a multiplicity which ‘makes for a much more interesting extended operational system’ (ctd in Zylinska and Hall, ‘Probings’, 120). This process of constant reciprocal actuation of the body—often described by Stelarc’s critics and commentators (see, for example, Kalem, ‘Becomng’; and Appleby, ‘Obselescence’) in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming’—finds its expression in the stress on the cyclical, or ‘loopy’, quality of his performances, especially Parasite, Fractal Flesh and Involuntary Body/Third Hand.
Fractal Flesh diagram (1995) © Stelarc
The speed at which technological advances change the human terrain makes it impossible to describe the body by ‘stable’ terms such as ‘essence’, or to use inadaptable ‘mind-body dualities’. The promotion of the complexity and multi-relatedness of the body-prosthesis relationship and its ‘loopy’ character, together with the ‘dogma’ of the obsolesce of the body, represents the very strategy that allows Stelarc to formulate his concept of the body. Crucially, this strategy relies on questioning the ‘alien’ nature of the prostheses and defining it as being on the same ‘ontological level’ as the biological body.
Extended Arm © Stelarc
As we have seen, the treatment of the body in Stelarc’s performances takes the form not of a positive definition, but rather, as Darren Tofts puts it, of ‘a series of speculative interventions enacted from within the embodiment itself.... It is this imminence, of the body as unfinished, a verbal, iterative state of becoming, which constitutes Stelarc’s ongoing body of work’ (‘Exploits’, 1). Accordingly, following what might be called the aporetic logic associated with Derrida, the performed body ceases to be defined positively, ‘constituted not by any positive essence, being or substance, but by a differential relation to what ostensibly lies beyond it: we “are” so to speak, our own outside’ (Bradley, ‘Technicity’, 83).
As Derrida himself puts it:
Man allows himself to be announced to himself after the fact of supplementarity, which is thus not an attribute—accidental or essential—of man. For ... supplementarity, which is nothing, neither presence nor absence, is neither a substance, nor essence of man. It is precisely the play of presence and absence, the opening of this play that no metaphysical or ontological concept can comprehend. (Grammatology, 244)
It is precisely this inability of the body to be comprehended by fixed metaphysical or ontological terms that announces (rather than defines or articulates, only thereby to totalise) the phenomenon of the body in Stelarc’s performances. In his own words:
[W]hat I am really interested in is what happens when disruptions and transgressions occur—not devising utopian or socially engineering schemes for some kind of dogmatic agenda. And none of my own writings have been anything more than poetic speculations. (Ctd in Zylinska and Hall, ‘Probings’, 118)
IV
Having reconstructed the strategies and arguments that herald Stelarc’s ‘opening of the body’, it now becomes possible to identify the two focal points of this strategy: the questioning of the body’s physiological boundaries, especially skin, and the establishment of the obsolete nature of the body that allows us to accept the technological prosthesis, be it a Third Hand or a massive Exoskeleton as shown here. These two points, though closely connected, may be identified and likened to the two aspects of the body-discussion: body-physical and body-ideological.
Both of the moments are conceptualised by Stelarc in his metaphor of the cyborg.
What you have here is an obsolete body that seems to have evolved as an absent body and has now been invaded by technology, a body that is hollow, that now performs involuntarily for remote people on the Internet. These alternative and involuntary experiences with technology allow you to question what a body is, what it means to be human. We have a fear of the zombie and an anxiety of the cyborg, but really it’s a fear of what we’ve always been and what we have already become. I’ve always thought that we’ve been simultaneously zombies and cyborgs; we’ve never really had a mind of our own and we’ve never been purely biological entities. (Ibid., 115)
Here the zombie stands for ‘a body with no mind of its own’, ‘a body that performs involuntarily’, while the cyborg stands for ‘a human-machine system’ that increasingly becomes automated (Stelarc, ‘Zombies’).
Ping Body diagram (1996) © Stelarc
These ‘new’ notions, of course, represent only an alternative to the recurrent body/prosthesis problem. The body that ‘performs involuntarily’ and becomes ‘increasingly automated’ is a body that derives from a ‘source’ which would normally be considered as ‘essentially alien’ or ‘external’ to the body: a ‘source’ that undermines the body’s existence as a coherent whole an denies the body its full autonomy. In other words, these new notions of ‘the zombie’ and ‘the cyborg’ undermine ‘the simplistic idea of agency and the individual’ (Stelarc, ‘Excess’), replacing the latter with a complex, ‘loopy’ multi-structure of the ever-actuated performed body (see especially Fractal Flesh and Ping Body).
In popular culture, these concepts are symbolised in the Borg character Seven of Nine from the Star Trek: Voyager series. Born human, Seven of Nine is assimilated by the Borgs at the age of six and converted into a drone worker, and is later ‘saved’ by the Voyager crew. Although deprived of 82% of the nanotechnology and implants that she (or it?) received during assimilation, Seven of Nine is nonetheless regarded as dubious by the Voyager crew and the process of her becoming ‘human again’ takes the rest of the series.
The image of a Borg or cyborg is significant for representing the prosthetic body as a body characterised by connectivity. The body and how we talk about its qualitative and quantitative features shifts from a notion of essence to a recognition of its potential to successfully assimilate its prostheses.
In this context, ‘assimilation’—so characteristic of the Star Trek Borg ‘community’4—highlights two possible extremes for theorising ‘the body’. What might be called the classical doctrine of the body sees a coherent, enclosed whole, defined by its essence (whatever that might be)—the body oneric, typical of essentialist and humanist non-technological, theo-teleological narratives. But we can also see the body as characterised by excess—by its multiplicity, connectivity or potentiality; or, using Stelarc’s register, by its absent, obsolete and prosthetic character. This latter view, if pushed to an extreme, results in the complete disappearance of an individual human (body), which dissolves into the system, structure or network—into a Borg-like hive society, where individual bodies augmented by pieces of technology serve the will of the communal hive-mind and/or recede into the multi-reciprocity of feedback loops. This kind of reductio ad absurdum threatens to become a reality in the technological demonstrations pushed forward in Stelarc’s performances. Again, however, it is the physical reality of the performances that makes it impossible to consider the body as something that would completely disappear or dissolve under the pressure of its technological attachments.
Exoskeleton © Stelarc
Stelarc’s notes to his performances make clear that the artist constantly faces (or at least has to be aware of) certain ‘anatomically based problems’ (‘Zombies’) and ‘month-long infections’ (‘Excess’). He thus has to manufacture his ‘avatars’ so that they do not pose a threat of injury, limiting their movement to degrees of freedom allowed by human limbs (Scheer, ‘Avatar’, 83-4). This precaution acutely demonstrates the limited capability of the body to host technology, or prosthesis in general. In this respect the body-concept and the body-flesh interfere—‘ideas are authenticated through physical action’ (ibid., 86), and the performance as a technique reaches its zenith. The constant flux of reflective feedback loops modifying and re-modifying the relationship between the body and its PLUS highlights the limits of the body-physical and body-theoretical at the same time.
Significantly, the performance practice becomes more than a mere ‘experiment’ to (dis)prove this or that hypothesis, theory, narrative, etc. As Stelarc himself notes, perhaps surprisingly:
All of these performances were done with a kind of posture of indifference, indifference as opposed to expectation, in other words you allow the performance to unfold, you allow things to happen and thus making it less predictable. There is no narrative. Only modular rhythmic activity. (’Cadaver’)
Conclusion
We would like to know what the body is, but the rate of technological change undermines any definition we might want to come up with. This leaves two ways of dealing with the situation. We could continue to insist on defining the body by using some sort of transcendental/idealistic/timeless explanatory principle, such as an ‘essence’ or a ‘god’, thereby postulating the body as a thing that is unrelated to the in-time development of any conceptual framework. Alternatively, we could choose to define the body as an inherent part of the conceptual framework used to define it, understanding that the body becomes what it is in and only in relation to that framework. Hence we might understand the body (as well as other related concepts, such as ‘humanity’) as ‘constituted by an originary lack of defining qualities—what [Stiegler] calls a “default” of origin (le défaut d´origine)—that must be supplemented from outside by technics’ (Bradley, ‘Technicity?’, 92). The elegance of this solution lies in the mutability of the conceptual framework that gives us, at the same time, a more or less acceptable definition. This does not ‘solve’ the problem in a traditional sense, but rather integrates the problem into the solution as a necessary part of that solution. The conceptual framework, then, should not be understood as something essentially different from the thing we wanted to define in the first place.
What does this mean in regards to Stelarc? It seems more or less obvious that Stelarc’s work inherently relies on, and can be fully appreciated only if we subscribe to, an understanding of the (human) body according to a view that might be attributed to Derrida or Stiegler—that ‘the human can be defined neither biologically nor transcendentally because it comes to being through technics’ (Bradley, ‘Technicity’, 91). This means having to ‘postulate’ the body as always already ‘open’ to re-definition, seeing it in Stelarc’s terms as ‘an evolutionary architecture for operating an awareness in the world’ (ctd in Zylinska and Hall, ‘Probings’, 117). Each ‘gadget’ Stelarc attaches to his body contributes to defining what the human body ‘is’ and what it can do. Whether these ‘new operations that the body executes allow the body to achieve new states of existence’ (Kalem, ‘Becoming’) or are just painful instances of ‘art for art’s sake’, depends entirely on what paradigm one subscribes to and what explanatory principles one prefers. Either way, Stelarc’s performances keep the body (body-concept and body-flesh) ‘open’ and do not offer more than they promise; they are simply ‘tentative speculations that generate some kind of discourse’ (Zylinska and Hall, ‘Probings’ 118). This is not much, but at the same time it is an awful lot. To arrive at a definite answer to the conundrum of the body, one would perhaps have to experience what Stelarc does during his performances; or, preferably, try it in person.To paraphrase Wittgenstein: You don’t know what a body is? Denk nicht, sondern versuch es allein.
Notes
1. See the latest video footage at Stelarc’s site. #back
2. Visit Stelar’s site for further references and interviews. #back
3. As, for example, John Appleby points out, the early suspensions are arguably ‘a problematization, rather than a breaking down, of the corporeal boundaries, which are only made more apparent in the process’ (‘Obsolescence’, 112). #back
4. See the Star Trek Wiki for further discussion of the Borg. #back
References
Armand, Louis. ‘Technics and Humanism’, in Technicity eds Arthur Bradley and Louis Armand. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006, pp. 42-77.
Bradley, Arthur. ‘Originary Technicity: Tecnology and Anthropology’, in Technicity eds Arthur Bradley and Louis Armand. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006, pp. 78-100.
Bradley, Arthur and Louis Armand, ‘Introduction: Thinking Technicity’, in Technicity eds Arthur Bradley and Louis Armand. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006, pp. 1-14.
Blackman, Lisa. The Body: The Key Concepts. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2008.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
Counter, Ben. Dark Adeptus. London: Black Library, 2006.
Kalem, Aylin. ‘“Becoming” Through Performance: An Analysis of the Body in Stelarc’s Performances’ <pdf>.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
Appleby, John. ‘Planned Obsolescence: Flying into the Future with Stelarc’, in The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, ed. Joanna Zylinska. London and New York: Continuum, 2002, pp. 101-13.
Scheer, Edward. ‘What Does an Avatar Want? Stelarc’s E-mootions’, in The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, ed. Joanna Zylinska. London and New York: Continuum, 2002, pp. 81-100.
Stelarc. ‘The Cadaver, the Comatose & the Chimera: Alternate Anatomical Architectures’ <pdf>.
Stelarc. ‘Excess and Indifference: Alternate Body Architectures’ <pdf>.
Stelarc. ‘Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence: Postevolutionary Strategies’. (1991).
Stelarc. ‘Zombies & Cyborgs: The Cadaver, the Comatose & the Chimera’ <pdf>.
Tofts, Darren. ‘Exploits of the Skin Trade: The Ascent of Post-humanism’ <pdf>.
Zylinska, Joanna and Gary Hall. ‘Probings: An Interview with Stelarc’, in The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age. London, New York: 2002, pp. 114-30.
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