Brian Massumi
http://www.telefonica.es/fat/emassumi.html
PROJECT: "extend intelligence beyond the earth." [1992: 28]
MEDIUM: the body.
Correction: the body is "obsolete."
Now there's a bind. Here is a "body artist" who wants to operate upon intelligence. Wouldn't that make him a "conceptual" artist? He gives every sign of wanting to have it both ways, making his medium the body and ideas. But then he goes and says that the first is "obsolete" [1983; 1984], all the while protesting that his work operates entirely outside of the "outmoded metaphysical distinctions of soul-body or mind- brain" [1984: 134; 1994: 389; 1995c]. Talk about difficult to please.
One thing that is clear is that Stelarc is not a conceptual artist. He is not interested in communicating concepts about the body. What he is interested in is experiencing the body as concept. He thinks of his performances, which involve minutely prepared, "austere" probings of the functional limits of the body [1994: 379, 383], as a direct "physical experience of ideas" [1992: 27]. In performance, "expression and experience join" [ibid.], making the body an "actual manifestation of a concept" [1984: 8]. The manifestation of a concept: the concepts Stelarc is interested in cannot be communicated about in the performance, because they only come into being through the performance. The ideas he takes as his medium, on a par with the body, do not pre-exist their physical expression. That is why his first performances were accompanied by no "notices, manifestos or written explanations" [Ken Scarlett in Stelarc 1984: 20]. It was only after the manifestation of the ideas began in the body that they were able to be disengaged enough from it to enter speech and writing.
Stelarc's art starts from and continually returns to a point at which idea and body have not yet split, or have rejoined. His medium is the body as a sensible concept.
PROBLEM: in what way is the body an idea, and the idea bodily? In what way can probing one extend the other? "How is it that the body thinks itself?" [1992: 26]
This is the problem Stelarc's work poses. And this is the problem that the art writer must re-pose if the concern is to approach the work on its own terms--or even meet it half-way--rather than imposing an outside frame of judgment upon it. The challenge is to write the rejoining of body and thought that Stelarc performs. This requires a willingness to revisit some our basic notions of what a body is and does, as an acting, perceiving, thinking, feeling thing.
THE MATTER OF INTELLIGENCE
Imagine for a moment you that were an intelligent insect. Would things be different?
This is precisely the question Stelarc seemed to be asking in some of his first performances, in which the artist and the audience donned helmets designed to scramble binocular vision by superimposing fragmented rear and side views onto the normal frontal view, producing a technologically assisted humanoid version of the compound eye of the insect ["Event from micro to macro and in between," 1970; "Helmet no. 3: put on and walk," 1970; described in Marsh 25-26 and Stelarc 1983, 24]. If you had compound eyes would the properties of the things you perceived be the same? Couldn't be. If their properties were different, would they be the same things? More or less.
In other words, no. This is not an argument for the relativity of perception. Far from it--it is an argument for its necessity. What does the bee see and smell in the flower? Enough to extract pollen from it. A creature's perception is exactly proportioned to its action upon the thing. The properties of the perceived thing are properties of the action, more than of the thing itself. This does not mean, on the other hand, that the properties are subjective, or in the perceiver. On the contrary, they are tokens of the perceiver's and the perceived's concrete inclusion in each other's world. The perception lies between the perceiver and the perceived. The sight of the flower is an actual bodily conjunction, a joint material connection of the perceiver and the perceived to different ends of the same reflected light wave, in different ways. That differential conjunction is the latency of a next conjunction. The contour and fragrance of the flower are the presence, to both perceiver and perceived, in different ways, of a possible touch, where once was only sniff and see. It is an understatement to say that a creature's perceptions are exactly proportioned to its actions. Its perceptions are its actions--in their latent state. Perceptions are possible actions [Bergson 1911: 102, 198-99; 1988: 20-22]. They belong to two orders simultaneously: an order of substitution (one conjunction relayed by another: action) and an order of superposition (the latent presence of the next conjunction in the actual one it will relay: anticipation). Both orders are real, and express a material necessity nourishment).
Orders of substitution and superposition are orders of thought, defined as the reality of an excess over the actual. This clearest in the case of anticipation, which in a real and palpable way extends the actual moment beyond itself, superposing one moment upon the next. But it applies even more to substitution, because substitutions never come in ones. There are any number of possible next connections. The bee may be laden and skip the flower. Or instead of collecting, it may return to the hive to signal the source of food. Or it may see be duped by a blossoming mimic into trying to mate instead. Or it may mate and eat. Substitutions are cases in a combinatoric (a system of "either-ors" sometimes conjoined as an "and"). Not all possible actions are present as perception to the same degree. All of the permutations composing the combinatoric are not actionably present in every perception to the same degree. Each perception is surrounded by a fringe of unlikelihood, of impalpable possibility [Bergson 1911:48-9, 278]. Perception shades off into a systematicity whose exact contours can only be thought. Perception and thought are poles of the same process. At the perceptual pole, more than one substitution are superposed, enveloped in action through anticipation. At the thought pole, all possible substitutions are present, de-activated and without overlap. They are unfolded from action, arrayed in extrinsic (either-or) relation to one another. The poles of thought and perception are at the limits of the same continuum. One limit is the mixture of experience (action, sensory plug-in, already-thought). The other is its purification, experience thought-out (the only-thought). At any given conjunction, a creature's activity, or lack thereof, will place it in the perceptual in-mix and, simultaneously, at a certain degree along the continuum toward the out-thought, depending on the extent to which it can anticipate action-substitutions, or possibilize its perception. Each actual conjunction is a dynamic mixture of different orders materially combining the experience of the actual with extensions beyond itself. The inextricability of the experiencing and the extension make perception an analysis in action and the perceived "thing" a sensible concept.
Every creature connecting with a flower will think-perceive it differently, extending the necessity of its perception into the only-thought of possibility to a varying degree. The flower is each of the thought-perceptions in which it is implicated. Which is not to say that there are as many flowers as there florally conjoined creatures. The flower-thing is all of the thought-perceptions in which it is implicated. And it is all of them singularly. Latent in the flower are all of the differential conjunctions it may enter into. The flower, as a thing "in itself," is its connectibility with other creatures outside itself. That connectibility is not of the order of action or anticipation, and is therefore not in the mode of possibility. It is of the order of force. Each connection is a shared plug-in to a force emitted or transmitted by the flower-thing. Like a light wave. The latency in this case is in the mode of energetic potential. There is more emitted or transmitted by the flower than any necessary perception of it picks up on (more ...). The bee's hungry or horny perception is not "relative" to the flower. It is selective of it (... and less). Perception is a limited selection, an actualization of one or more potential plug-ins. There is more in the "thing" than in the perception of it. The latency of the potentials in the flower constitutes an order that follows different rules of formation and is broader in band-width and more complexly woven than any possible combinatoric extracted from it. The thought-system of the possible is a necessary loss of order. The latency of the flower is inexhaustible. There are no doubt insectival ways of plugging into floral forces that no bug has yet experienced. More than that, the humblest flower enfolds forces no creature, not even a human, will ever know to connect to: colors outside the visible spectrum, forces too small, too large, too subtle or simply too different to conjoin. To answer the question, the flower the bee sees is not the same flower--it is the singular flower. More precisely, It is a graspable multiple of that singularity, a need-oriented simplification of its inexhuastible complexity.
So what does a human see in a flower? Enough to extract a pharmaceutical. Human perception is unique in the degree to which it can systematically extend itself into the only-thought. The flower-thing is an object to the human: a set of probing, regularized, floral connections systematized in such a way as to ensure the maximum repeatability of the largest number of actions, with the maximum uniformity of result. Predictability (anticipation perfected). The object is the systematic stockpiling of possible actions in the thing, in general. The flower as object corresponds to no particular flower. The object is never given in perception. It doubles each given flower-thing, like an only- thinkable shadow of the actually perceived. The flower-object blooms only in the order of the possible. Probing, regularized, repeatable, uniform connection--the systematicity of a thing--constitute a disengagement of the thing's thinking from its perceiving, a maximization of its extension into thought.
Paradoxically, this perfecting of the order of substitution is an intensification of the order of superposition at the same time as it is a disengagement from it. Objectivity makes more possibilities more anticipatable, more likely: more accessible as next connections. This means that the connectibility of the thing has increased: it now has more potentials. Objectivity shadows the perception with an increased charge of possibility, which cycles back into perception, to augment the potentiality of the thing. The forces enveloped in thing have gained in the diversity of effects into which they feed. They have been sur-charged, intensified. The thing's selection returns to it as an augmentation of its singularity. Its simplification returns to it as a complexification, a gain in order. Re-infolding: possibilization, potentialization, complexification.
This extension out of perception is also as a broadening of perception. The loss of order is only a moment in an expansive process in which perception and thought form a positive feedback loop (as do things and thought, by way of perception). Things, perception, and thought are in a reciprocal movement into and out of each other and themselves. They are moments or dimensions of the same process of mutual reinforcement and co-conversion.
The extension of the actual into the possible, looping into mutual intensification of things, perception and thought--this is intelligence. The systematization of intelligence--the dimension where possibility moves out of the actuality of perception to come into its own--is what goes by the name of instrumental reason. Instrumental reason is by no means all of thought, or even the only only-thought. It is a thought-variety: one (analytic) variety of the only-thought. Intelligence is an outgrowth of need. Instrumental reason is the extension of need into utility (a greater co-presence of possibilities, enabling a systematic exploration of the combinatoric, and by virtue of that a calculated choice between possible next connections--even a methodical invention of new connections as previously inaccessible aspects of forces emerge in the course of the probings). A bee intelligently analyzes-in-action the flower, toward the fulfilment of a need. The instrumentally reasoning human extends the analysis-in-action in thought, toward the invention of utilities. There is no clear and distinct dividing line between intelligence and instrumental reason. Every thought-perception is both, to a varying degree, in mixture and co-conversion.
What else does a human see in a flower? Besides pharmaceuticals? Poetry, for one thing. The extension from need to utility can extend again.
Stelarc's bug goggles fulfilled no need. They extended no-need into no utility. And they extended no-utility into "art." They were an exercise in the perceptual poetry of instrumental reason.
We started out saying Stelarc was a body artist, and are now saying that his art is in some (poetic) way objective. This is not a contradiction. For the object is an extension of the perceived thing, and the perceived thing is a sensible concept, and the sensible concept is a materialized idea embodied not so much in the perceiving or the perceived considered separately but in their between, in their conjunction. But are the terms independent of the conjunction? What is a perceiving body apart from the sum of its perceivings, actual and possible? What is a perceived thing apart from the sum of its being-perceiveds, actual and potential? Separately, each is no action, no analysis, no anticipation, no thing, no body. The thing is its being-perceiveds. A body is its perceivings. "Body" and "thing," and by extension "body" and "object," exist only as implicated in each other. They are differential plug-ins into the same forces, two poles of the same connectibility. The thing is a pole of the body, and vice versa. Body and thing are extensions of each other. They are mutual implications: co-thoughts of two-headed perception.
Extensions. The thing, the object, can be considered prostheses of the body. Provided that it is remembered that the body is equally a prosthesis of the thing.
Matter, as it enters into the double analytic order of necessary substitution and superposition, and then extends again into utility--matter as it enters into things and objects--matter itself is prosthetic. Things and objects are literally, materially, prosthetic organs of the body [Bergson 1911: 170]. But if bodies and objects exist only as implicated in each other, in necessary and useful reciprocity, then isn't it just as accurate to say that the body is literally, materially, an organ of its things? In mutual implication, it is not clear who is used by whom.
Having a instrumentally reasoning body for an organ can be most useful to a thing. A flower in which humans see a pharmaceutical will grow in abundance. Is the flower an aid to the perpetuation of the human, or is the human, like the mimic-duped bee, a reproductive organ of the flower? Both. You can have it either way. It's just a question of which pole you approach the question from. Human and flower are in differential, polar co-functioning. They meet in the reciprocity of perception. But the reciprocity is not a symmetry, since they plug in differently to contrasting poles of shared forces, and travel, through their forcible conjunction, in different directions: one toward individual health maintenance, the other toward species reproduction. Thought-perception is asymmetrical prosthetic symbiosis.
A flower in which humans see poetry rather than pharmaceuticals will also grow widely. And differentiate. The poetics of roses has led to a multiplication of strains, each bearing the name of its first human prosthesis. Need and utility lead to self-same reproduction. Uselessness, on the other hand, lends itself to invention.
This link between uselessness and invention even applies to instrumental reason: a true invention is an object that precedes its utility. An invention is something for which a use must be created. Once the utility is produced, it rapidly self-converts into a need. This is the direction of flow of the history of technology (of which bodies, things and objects are the first artifacts): backwards. With invention, the perceptual direction of travel between the poles of necessity and utility, between the intelligence and instrumentality, possibility and reason, is reversed. An invention is a sensible concept that precedes and produces its own possibility (its system of connection-cases; its combinatoric). An invention is an in situ plumbing of potential, rather than an extrapolation of disengaged possibility. It is a trial-and-error process of connecting with new forces, or in new ways with old forces, to unanticipated effect. Invention is a plug-in to the impossible. It is only by plumbing that connection that anything truly new can arise.
The goggles Stelarc invented effected an inventive reversion from human instrumental reason to humanoid insect-intelligence. Needlessly. The goggles are still waiting for a use to be created for them (and doubtless have a long wait ahead of them still). Stelarc's art, In its first carefully engineered gesture, sets itself the project of applying instrumental reason in such a way as to suspend need and utility. His technically accomplished body-objects precede their possiblity--but stop short of producing it. If he is a body artist whose medium is also ideas, then he is not content with his medium. He converts. He began by approaching ideas as materialized thoughts, and making them into unthinkable things--artifacts that can only be sensed. Then he put the unthinkable things on the body to see what might become of it. The body and thought converge toward a shared indeterminacy. You can't begin to know what a bug-goggle can do until you don it. You have to experience it even to begin to imagine a use for it, and what your body is with it. "Imagine" is still too reasoned a term: any eventual use is impossibly enveloped in the still-undefined experience, compoundly unpreviewed. Which is why the goggles were deployed in performances requiring audience participation [Marsh 25-26]. The goggles were the trigger for a collective thought-body event ever so tentatively suggesting the beginnings of a symbiosis.
The only-sensed--sensation. Sensation is dumb potential, a kind of zero-degree of thought-perception, and of the possibility it disengages. Or, if you prefer, it is a further pole of thought-perception, whose every conjunction is accompanied to a varying degree by sensation, by the unthinkability of things, the as-yet unnecessary and stubbornly useless: the felt. Sensation is an extremity of perception. It is the limit at which perception is eclipsed by the sheerness of experience, unreasoned-out, yet unextended into analytically ordered, predictably reproducible, possible action. Sensation is a state in which action, perception and thought are so intensely, performatively mixed that their in- mixing falls out of itself. Sensation is fallout from perception. It is pure mixture, the in- mixing-out of the mixed. Endo-fallout. If perceptions are multiples of the singular, sensation is the singularity of the multiple. Inaccessible as such to active extension and out-thinking, it is an excessive dimension of the purely infolded, doubling perception. When thought feeds back into perception, it is by way of sensation. Sensation is the singular point of the re-infolding of the unfolded. As possibilized, perception has unfolded or extended itself so far that it falls out of itself at the other end of the continuum, into the only-thought. It is so purely unfolded, so extensively out-reasoned, as to disengage from the singularity of experience, into generality. Generality is by definition in excess over any and every actual conjunction. It is in excess that the out-thought and the in-felt, the general and the singular, rejoin. Sensation and thought, at their respective limits as well as in their feed-back into each other, are in excess over experience, over the actual. They extend into the non-actual, recede into latency. The latency of thought toward the extended limit of perception is in the mode of possibility. The latency of sensation toward the enveloping limit of perception is in the mode of potential. Intelligence stretches between the extremes, from one pole of perception to the other.
If you were an intelligent insect, would you be reading this? SUSPENDED ANIMATIONS
At a certain point, Stelarc realized that fourteen hooks weren't enough [1983: 18]. A doctor advised him that he should use eighteen at minimum, so the weight of his body would be more evenly distributed. That way his wounds would be smaller, and there would less danger of his flesh tearing.
Stelarc's body suspensions were careful, calculated, literally antiseptic. They weren't about risk. They weren't about danger for danger's sake. They weren't shamanistic or mystical or ecstatic. And they most certainly weren't masochistic. The pain wasn't sought after or revelled in. It was a soberly accepted by-product of the project. Notions such as shamanism and masochism applied to his work are "irrelevant" [1988: 70]: "utterly wrong" 1984: 8]. The point was never to awe the audience with the artist's courage or hubris. Neither was it to treat the audience to a dramatic staging of symbolic suffering in order to shed light on or heal some supposedly founding agony of the human subject. For one thing, there wasn't an audience (and if there were, it is not clear that they would have seen that symbolism through compound eyes).
So what's the project again? "Extending intelligence beyond the earth" [ 1992: 28].
Hold that thought.
"What is important is the body as an object, not a subject--not being a particular someone but rather becoming something else" [1988: 70]. Stelarc applies instrumental reason--careful, calculated, medically-assisted procedure--to the body, taken as an object, in order to extend intelligence into space, by means of a suspension. Now how does suspending the body-object extend intelligence? And what is the something else the body becomes, beyond its objectivity and subjectivity?
To begin to answer these questions, it is necessary to clarify what precisely is suspended. It is not simply the actual body of the artist, because once again the body as an object is in excess over any given actual conjunction it enters into, by virtue of the shadow of generality that is one with its objectivity (reproducibility, predictability, uniformity of anticipated result). By targeting the body as object, Stelarc is targeting the body in its generality; he is targeting the generality of the body. But how, without symbolizing, without communicating to an audience, can a particular performance target a generality? How can a single performance raise itself to the amplitude of the objective? It can't.
"I didn't honestly think I'd be doing more than one suspension event but there have been a series of ideas that I felt compelled to realize. In the first four suspension events the body was rotated through 360 degrees in space. The next series of suspensions were involved with all kinds of structural supports. ... More recently there have been the environmental suspensions." [1984: 17].
On second thought, maybe it can: if suspensions, like substitutions, do not come in ones. Rolled up in the first suspension-event was an indefinite series of others that were unanticipated. These were present in the first, not in anticipation but in implication. The first accomplished suspension event set in motion a serial unfolding of variations already implied in it. For it may have explored what comes of suspending the body in a particular way. But what of other ways? Is it the same to be suspended upright as horizontal? Upside down as right-side up? Inside from a frame of poles and outside from the top of a building in Manhattan or over a rocky sea-side? Obsolete Bodies/Suspensions/Stelarc [1984] follows the unfolding exploration of the field opened up by the implicitly serial ur- idea of suspension. Each developed event was a variation on that idea, approached from a different angle--permutations in a combinatoric.
The suspended body is a sensible concept: the implications of the event are felt first, before being thought-out. They are felt in the form of a "compulsion": an abstractness with all the immediacy of a physical force. What the apparatus of suspension did was to set up the body's relation to itself as a problem, a compulsion, and to construe that problem in terms of force. The basic device employed was, after all, an interruption of the body's necessary relation to the grounding force of human action: gravity. The hooks turned the skin into a counter-gravity machine [1984: 66]. The consequences of using the resident forces of the flesh--its elasticity and strength--to counteract gravity were not clearly anticipatable, as illustrated by the fact that the first suspension event was blocked at the last minute by the sponsoring institution, fearing it might be left with a shredded artist [Marsh 63-64]. Stelarc's suspensions methodically unravelled the implications of hooking up the body as a counter-gravity machine. Only after a wide range of the possible counter-gravity connections were actualized--only after the combinatoric was close to being exhausted--did the artist feel uncompelled to continue. This process took over ten years.
The suspension-variations should not be confused with answers to the problem posed. The problem posed by a force cannot be "solved"--only exhausted. In a need- or utility-oriented context, the permutations comprising the combinatoric of possible action doubling the given conjunction can indeed be thought-out as cases of solution that inform and precede a choice, the selection of the "right" (functional) solution. But here it is precisely need and utility that are suspended. The regularized, necessary and useful actions of the human body all hinge in one way or another on its bipedal upright posture-- its usual way of counteracting gravity. Interrupt that, and you have profoundly disconnected the human body from its normal realm of activity--from its possible actions. The suspended body is in no position to extend its present situation into a logically expressible next step by choosing an action from a set of possible actions. It is not only in a needless and useless condition, it is in an utterly dysfunctional one. It is in no condition to choose. No analysis-in-action leading to selection here. Not even a presentiment of eventual use-value, as with the bug-goggles. The usual mode in which the body functions as a sensible concept--possibility--is radically suspended. The body is placed at the limit of its functionality. The answer to the question of what is being suspended is: embodied human possibility. Each suspension in the series was, not a possible answer, but a re- posing of a problem that stubbornly remains a problem from end to end of its serial unfolding, that refuses solution as long as the human body is the kind of sensible concept it normally is, and functions the way it does. The repeated explorations resolved nothing. Each time, the body was left hanging. By the end of the series, the body is, well-- exhaustively hung. Nothing more. No need, use, effectively conveyed symbolism, or even communicable meaning, was generated. A process, simply, had been set in motion, and ran its course.
What is important to Stelarc is approaching the body as an object, in other words as an objectivized sensible concept whose ideational mode is that of possibility. Stelarc starts at the end. He starts from possibility as a limit, the outside limit of the body's functionality, its already-extension into the only-thought of instrumental reason. He assumes the body as a known object of instrumental reason, with known, regularized functions of need and utility. Then he applies that same instrumental reason--in the engineering of scaffolding, in the medical knowledge used to take health precautions--in a way carefully calculated to cause it to self-interrupt. That the suspensions were not initially operating in a mode of possibility is amply demonstrated by the fact that their seriality was unforeseen. It is only retrospectively that the series can be resolved into a combinatoric of mutually implicating permutations. Only retroactively are the suspension events an operation on possibility, on the generality of the body, at one of its limits. The possibility of the series results from the series, rather than conditioning it [Bergson 1946: 107-125]. The limit-state's dimension of possibility is its past dimension. The limit-state prior to its possibility, before the consummation of its past, is a becoming "something else." A pre-past suspended present: pure, corporeal futurity. The suspension fills the actual conjunction with unpossibilized futurity: pure potential. Sensation. The project is to use particular bodily conjunctions to counteract generality in a way that brings out the body's singularity. The project is to invent an indeterminate bodily future, in a singularity of sensation. Paul Virilio, so obstinately wrong about so many aspects of Stelarc's work, got this one right: Stelarcian suspensions approach the body-as-object in order to "negate" it (counteract it) it "in favor of pure sensation" [Virilio 1992: 32; Virilio 1995]. In the only suspension in which the body was actively doing something while suspended (hoisting itself on a pulley), what Stelarc registered was a "split between what the body was feeling and what it was doing" [1984: 100]. The mix of activity and suspended animation only made perceptible the divergence between action and sensation: the way in which sensation falls out from action-perception, into a futurity that precedes and doubles the body's present (as opposed to a future, which follows from the present, in actual unfolding). The seriality of the performances was a multiplying of that infolded future- singular, before it was the laying-out of a combinatoric.
Why explore sensation when the project is intelligence? The suspensions in themselves not extend intelligence beyond the gravitational field of the earth. If they did, they would not be suspensions of the human body-object but, precisely, free-floating continuations of it. What they do is prepare the ground. The suspended body expresses nothing of need or use, nothing of symbolic or semantic value. As a sensible concept, it is an undetermined one from the point of view of function and meaning. It is a corporeal opening.
Functions, as well as meanings, are expressions. Every action of a body is a physical expression of its analysis-in-action of the perceptual world, of the plug-in to forces of which the body and its things are complementary poles. The hung body is not actively expressive. But it is expressive nevertheless. Stelarc repeatedly evokes the pattern of ripples and hills that form on the hook-stretched skin, calling it a "gravitational landscape." [1984: 16, 21, 117, 120; 1995a]. The body visibly expresses the force whose counteracting posed the problem. The "something else," the something other than an object that it becomes by being approached as an object in this way is a transducer [1995b: 35]: a local organization of forces (epidermal elasticity and strength) responding to and transformatively prolonging another force (gravity). A transducer transformatively "manifests rhythms and flows of energy" [1984: 8, 66]. The body-transducer transforms gravity from an invisible condition of station, locomotion and action into a visibility [1984: 20]. Lightwaves are not the only sensible force into which gravity transduced. Many of Stelarc's suspension events also amplified the sounds of the body. The rush of blood through the artist's veins as his body rises in a state of heightened receptivity to the effects of gravity are transformed into amplified sound waves that spread to fill the room. The transducing of the body is extended beyond the skin, to propagate through the surrounding space [1984: 144]. The transductive physicality of the body extends to the limits of its spatial containment. The body-as-transducer literally, physically fills its space, becoming architectural [1984: 16], as blood flows sonically to the walls, echoing its built limits. The body, in becoming a transducer, has become two more things: a visibility of gravity, and a sonic architecturality. A corporeal opening onto sound, image, architecture ... and more. The future. Sensation is the key to accessing the more-than regularized action and perception that is the body-thing.
The suspended more-thans of sound and vision are already extensions, but not yet of intelligence. It is better to call them extendabilities than extensions, because there is no receiver, no audience: there is no one present to register and relay them. They expire with the event. They are beginnings of extensions, incipient extensions. Among the many directions in which a gravitational landscape and a sonic body-architecturality might be extended is into a mystical symbolism of nature-culture fusion, with inevitable overtones of shamanism and exalted masochism. The absence of an audience works precisely to block that extension. The audience will be included again in Stelarc's art only when the conditions are right for an extension in an entirely different direction: a machinic direction, toward the cyborg, reached by extending the plug-in to gravity to another fundamental force of human existence, electromagnetism [1984: 21].
In retrospect, the suspension events composing the series can be considered to have been most exhaustively performed in their mutual implication, most intensely rolled into each other in indeterminate futurity, most problematically enveloped, in a singular event--one that was not to be repeated. That event is the veritable "first," even though chronologically it came in the middle. It is the first in the sense of taking a logical precedence of sorts, embodying as it does the sensible concept of the suspended body in an unthinkably extreme form. It is the most intense embodiment of the ur-idea of suspension. It is of this event that all the others were multiples.
The body was contained between two planks and suspended from a quadrapod pole structure in a space littered with rocks. The eyes and mouth were sewn shut. Three stitches for the lips, one each for the eyelids. The body was daily inserted between the planks and in the evening was extracted to sleep amongst the rocks. Body participation was discontinued after seventy-five hours. [1984: 57; 1983: 16]]
All bodily expression was closed down. Barely glimpsed between the planks, the body generated no gravitational landscape by day. By night, it slipped into a surrounding landscape, reduced to one gravity-stranded object among others, a body-mineral in among the rocks, in darkness, unseen even by itself. Not only did the body not transduce and externalize its sounds, it could not speak. It had ceased to speak, to see and make visible, even to eat. It was shut down. Unplugged. Disconnected from every form of meaningful, need-based, useful function. Delivered supine unto the force of gravity. Stranded abject object.
It was argued earlier that there was not a difference in nature between object and organ. The terms are just conventional designations for differential regions of the same polarized perceptual field. If the transductive suspensions, in which the body began to extend into in image and sound, were counteractions of the body's objectivity, then the sewn suspension goes one step further, countering the organicity of the body. A body that can express nothing, not even incipient let alone possible action, is supremely dysfunctional. It is no longer a functioning unit whose parts work in concert toward the anticipated accomplishment of necessary and useful actions. It is a body without organs [Deleuze and Guattari 149-166]. On hold. Sewn and suspended, the body folds in on itself, to the point that it is not only no longer an object or an organism, it is even stretched to the limit of things. This is what Stelarc dubs the "Anaesthetized Body"[n.d. "The Anaesthetized Body"; 1996].
Distraught and disconnected. [ibid.].
The body was passified, but the mind was restless. [1984: 59]
The body is corporeally challenged, its active engagement with the world interrupted. But the forced passivity of the interruption is filled with ferment. The "restlessness" of the body is not "action," since it produces no outward effect and disengages no possibility. It is a kind of activity prior to action. It is like the unextended, incipient expression of the unsewn suspensions, only even more incipient, not even an unheard echo, only a gravitational vibration still swaddled in the matter of the body. The body is no longer a transducer, but rather a resonation chamber, a resonating vessel compulsively, ineffectually registering the force of gravity--as what? In states of near- sensory deprivation [1994: 383], and more importantly of deprivation of expression, the mind cannot stop, but neither can it continue. The dividing line between sleep and waking blurs. "Imploding the dichotomy" [1984: 147]. At the dividing line, their mutual limit, there is a ferment of what might be action or might be thought, an hallucinatory (or hyper-lucid?) indistinction between mind-states and body-states, between actions and echoes, sights and dreams, thoughts and adventures. Since there is no follow-through, no perceivable effect of any kind, it is impossible to tell, and all the more impossible to stop. The dividing line between passivity and activity blurs. The body, passified to the limit, becomes uncontrollably activated, inwardly animated. That inwardness is badly served by the word "mind." Nothing is conclusively distinguished. Everything impinges. Everything is felt. Between the planks, it is the force of gravity, carried to its inertial extreme, that materially registers and resonates, its effect transformatively infolded in the sensitized flesh. The body turns into a hobbled receiver tuned to the frequency of gravity. The received force undergoes the beginning of a transduction. But instead of being unfolded again, continued, extended into a perceptible, actionable, or thinkable transmission, it bubbles into every mode at once, compulsively, with no let up and no outlet. "Everything in motion, connected and contained" [1984: 105]. This is the zero-degree of sensation, sensation as the zero-degree of everything that a body can do. Suspended animation. "Between gravity and fantasy" [1984: 153]. Thought and action return together to the body, and the body compulsively rebegins them and their every mix, spontaneously regenerating all that goes into making a body and its complements. Sensation is body- substance, the indeterminate matter from which the body and its objects and organs unfold: felt futurity. Resonating, animated body-substance: corporeal unfolding infolded. Not transductive enough to be called a thing, it is the stuff of things, turned in on itself: restless matter, action wanting, waiting for perception. The sensible concept of the body turned ur-idea of potential.
Instrumental reason has returned to matter, sweeping everything associated with intelligence back with it. The direction of perception has been reversed [Bergson 1911: 218-20], and the reversion pushed to the limit. Unsew the still suspended body-substance, hook it up again and amplify it, and you get the beginnings of visible and sonic extension. The matter of the body starts to unfold again, to re-extend, feed forward, still shy, however, of utility and need. Lower the ropes, stand it up, put an artifact like bug- goggles on it--or better, attach a robotic arm to it--and you can perhaps just begin to imagine a use. The body starts to re-organize in response to the unaccustomed connection. Its matter just starts to re-systematize. Its analysis-in-action just barely starts to possiblize. You can feel utility just over the horizon. But it won't arrive until the world can accommodate its usefulness in more than a presentiment. When a way is invented to attach the robotic arm to a computer and remotely control it--now there are possibilities. It could be used in hostile off-world environments, for equipment repair or mining. It could fulfill so many wondrous functions. Why, it would be a necessity in any extra- terrestrial expansion.
As much as to say, the obsolescence of the body that Stelarc waxes long on is produced. Space? Who needs it? The body is perfectly suited to its current terrestrial habitat. If anything, it is too well adapted to it. The evolutionary success of the human species is its own greatest threat. There are, however, existing solution-cases to the problems of overpopulation and environmental degradation. An equitable, sustainable, post-capitalist economy for one. There is no reason why the current human body-object could not find a niche in that possible future. The terrestrial body will be obsolete from the moment a certain subpopulation feels compelled to launch itself into an impossible, unthinkable future of space colonization. To say that the obsolescence of the body is produced is to say that it is compelled. To say that it is compelled is to say that it is "driven by desire" [1988: 70] rather than by need or utility.
But in less millennial terms, isn't each little change on earth an adjustment of the functioning of the human body and its system of objects and combinatoric of possibilities? And doesn't every adjustment imply on some level an interruption of the old functioning to make an opening for the new? And isn't change always inexorably under way? Then in a very real sense the body is always already obsolete, has been obsolete an infinity of times and will be obsolete countless more--as many times as there are adaptations and inventions. The body's obsolescence is the condition of change. Its vitality is in obsolescence. We are all astronauts. We all moonwalkers without organs, taking small perceptual steps for humankind. The body without organs that Stelarc sews himself into is not so singular after all. Or rather, it is so singular, but the singular accompanies and conditions any and every particular, every action, every adjustment, and every extension of these particularities into the general. The body without organs--the reversion of thought and perception-action into pure sensation--is a constant companion of the organism, its future-double.
OPERATIVE REASON
Stelarc's art produces the hung body. Hung things have entered science and lore under the aegis of chaos theory. The focus of chaos theory are events called "bifurcation points" or "singular points." A singular point is when a system enters a peculiar state of indecision, where what its next state will be turns entirely unpredictable. The unfolding of the system's line of actions interrupts itself. The system momentarily suspends itself. It has not become inactive. It is in ferment. It has gone "critical." This "chaotic" interlude is not the simple absence of order. It is in fact a super-ordered state: it is conceived as the literal co-presence of all of the possible paths the system may take, their physical inclusion in one another. Criticality is when what are normally mutually exclusive alternatives pack into the materiality of the system. The system is no longer acting and outwardly reacting according to physical laws unfolding in linear fashion. It is churning over, in its system-substance, its own possible states. It has folded in on itself, becoming materially self-referential--animated not by external relations of cause-effect, but by an intensive interrelating of versions of itself. The system is a knot of mutually implicated alternative transformations of itself, in material resonance. Which transformation actually occurs, what the next outward connection will be, cannot be predicted by extrapolating from physical laws. The suspended system is in too heightened state of transformability. It is hypermutable. Hyperconnectible--by virtue of having functionally disconnected itself [n.d. "The Anaethetized Body"]. The system hesitates, works through the problem of its critical self-referentiality, and "chooses" an unfolding.
When scientists use words like "choice" they are of course not implying that the system reflects and uses instrumental reason to choose from a set of pre-set possibilities arrayed before it. But it is no exaggeration to call the system's intensive animation thought, defined once again as "the reality of an excess over the actual." The self- referentiality of the critical system is indeed in excess over the actual. The possible futures are present, but only in effect--incipient effect (resonance and interference, vibration and turbulence, unfoldable into an order). Possibility has, in effect, materialized. The matter of the system has entered a state where it does not disengage a possibility, but instead absorbs it into its animated matter. Materially present possibility is potential. The system's critical condition, of course, is as actual as any other state. But the self-referentiality of its criticality is not. What the self-absorbed system infolds is present in potential. Potential doubles and animates the actual conjunction, but is not reducible to it.
Call a form of thought that is materially self-referential as opposed to reflective; absorbs possibility without extrapolating it; that embodies a super-order of superposition without disengaging an order of substitution; that infolds without extending; that does not imply a distance between successive states of a system, mediated by an intervening action, but rather their immediate proximity to each other, their inclusion in one another; that chooses according to principles unsubordinated to the established regularities of cause-effect; that poses an unpredictable futurity rather than anticipating outcomes--call that kind of thought operative reason, as opposed to instrumental reason. Not a purposive analysis-in-action: a hesitant self-definition in suspension. Not an extending out of matter into thought; not a doubling of perception by thought: a folding of thought into matter as such. Instrumental reason makes thoughtfully explicit what is materially implied by the criticality of operative reason. It is its unfolding, its extension. Even as it doubles perception, it is already arraying futurities in extrinsic relation to each other: as mutually exclusive possibilities standing outside and against each other in principle. Possibility is extended potential--a prosthesis of potential. It is an out-worn double of the double that is potential, the thought-shadow it retrospectively projects. It pales in comparison with the felt intensity of the critical.
Now the critical point may be an interregnum between two different orders, two different systemic organizations with their characteristic paths of actions and reactions. Or, it may constitute a threshold between disorder and order, an entropically disordered past and a future of systemic organization. The most celebrated example of the latter case is the Bnard instability, which occurs when turbulent patterns of diffusion in a heated liquid spontaneously order into convection cells. The ordering is not predictable in terms of heat diffusion alone. In fact, according to the theory of heat diffusion it is so improbable that, in principle, it must be considered practically impossible [Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 142-43]. But it efffectively happens. Theorists of such "dissipative structures" explain that the self-organizing of liquid into a convection system is triggered because the instability of situation suddenly makes the liquid "sensitive" to gravity [Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 163-5; Prigogine and Stengers 1988: 59-60]. Gravity suddenly registers, and resonates. It is the "sensing" of a force that up to that point was not pertinent to the system's transformation and had been "ignored" that triggers the self- ordering. Gravity, normally a potent force of entropy, induces a locally negentropic effect: an emergence of order from disorder. Sensed, gravity has triggered or induced negentropy. Gravity has appeared as a negentropic inducer of hypermutability and its unfolding. Given the turbulence of the situation, the particularities of the convection system induced by the sensation of gravity are not predictable; even when or if it the ordering will occur is not certain. However many times the experimenter succeeds in achieving the effect, it is always a surprise. Induction is the experimental production of the practically impossible. The "impossible" is practiced when a counter-effect is produced to the normal unfolding of the natural laws in play--achieved not by contravening them, but by combining them in such a way as to create an ineradicable margin of objective indeterminacy from which a new order spontaneously arises.
This suggests a definition of operative reason as implemented by humans (in other words, as mixed with purposive analysis-in-action in an extended situation). Operative reason is the experimental crafting of negentropic induction, to produce the practically impossible. It is pragmatic rather than analytic. It doesn't master a situation with exhaustive knowledge of alternative outcomes. It "tweaks" it. Rather than probing the situation to bring it under maximum control, it prods it, recognizing it to be finally indomitable, and respecting its autonomy. Operative reason is concerned with effects--specifically counter-effects--more than causes. It deploys local interventions in an attempt to induce a qualitative global transformation: small causes with disproportionate effect, excess-effect, a little tweak for a big return. Operative reason is inseparable from a process of trial and error, with occasional shots in the dark, guided in every case by a pragmatic sense of the situation's responsivity (as opposed to its manipulability). Like Stelarc's art, and in spite of (or perhaps because of) its thoroughly pragmatic exercise, it is closer to intuition [1984: 153; Bergson 1911: 186-95; Bergson 1946: 126-53] than to reflective thought (hence the serviceable but inaccurate evocation of "poetry" earlier in this essay). Following another suggestion of Stelarc's, his art is more akin to alchemy, the qualitative science of impossible transfomations, than to high chemistry or physics, quantitative sciences of elemental causes. In a more recent vocabulary, Stelarc's project is to practice art as a "minor" science [Deleuze and Guattari 361-74].
As part of that project, Stelarc's suspensions return intelligence to the degree-zero of sensation. There, thought rejoins action, the body rejoins matter, and the animate rejoins the inanimate. These no sooner rejoin than re-unfold, divergently re-extend to enter into extrinsic and often mutually exclusive relations with one another (in keeping with and revising the combinatoric of their possibility). Suspension is the counter-gravity ground-zero of differential emergence. Differential emergence from matter: the definition of evolution. What else would the ur-idea be? Stelarcian suspensions are a contrived induction of the conditions of evolution--that most global of qualitative transformations-- an artful rehearsing of its repetition. Stelarc's project is to tweak the human body-object into a sensitivity to new forces, or neglected aspects of familiar forces, in order to induce it into a state of hypermutability which, if well desired and operatively extended, might bring the big result. QUADRUPLEX
Curiously, Stelarc bristles at any suggestion that his own project has evolved. He repeatedly points out that he was working on the idea of the suspensions at the same time he was designing the bug-goggles [1983:15], and that the first suspensions were contemporaneous with the development of the robotic "Third Arm" that was to become the hallmark of his cyborgian experiments.
The different moments of Stelarc's project are, logically, strictly simultaneous. They are less moments in the temporal sense (periods) than co-present dimensions. In other words, they are mutually included in one another, each infolded in every other as a potential transformative extension of it. What was said of the series of suspensions applies to the larger series of his work: each event re-poses the same problem, differently. The problem, of course, is evolution. No final solution is offered. No particular utopic future for humankind is elaborated. No clear possibilities disengage, from which the artist would exhort his audience to choose. Instead, the same problem, the same critical condition, is re-played in multiplying variation. The same potential is rejoined, each time to different, and unforeseen, effect. Possibility is analytically thought-out into a combinatoric, to predictable effect. Potential is pragmatically, impossibly re-infolded in continual experimental variation. Possibility is general by nature: analyzable into set of solution- cases disengaged from more than one particular conjunction. Potential is singular: a multiple in- and unfolding into each other of divergent futurities, only the divergence of which is reproducible. The particular nature of each divergent conjunction in the series is precisely what is problematic. Multiple in- and unfolding: singularity is multiplex. The multiplex divergence of the singular is not to be confused with the disjunctive simplicity at the basis of the system of possibility (mutual exclusion).
If Stelarc's work has to do with desire, it is not desire for something: no utopia. In more ways than one, it is desire without an object. It is desire as a process, purely operative rather than object-oriented: the process of reason rejoining desire.
What are the dimensions of Stelarc's project? There are at least four: 1) Operation: suspension/disconnection. Medium: the sensible concept as sensation. Mode: induction.
This is the state in which all of the dimensions are most intensely infolded in one another. It is a degree-zero of the corporeal, in the same sense that the vacuum is the degree-zero of matter itself. The vacuum, physicists inform us, is not an absence, but an over-presence. The vacuum is the physical co-presence of all possible particles, shooting into and out of existence, folding into and out of each other too fast to be instrumentally perceived with any predictive accuracy, resonating with each other in real excess over the actual. The vacuum is the the operative ur-idea of material existence. It is the state of indistinction of matter with what is normally mutually exclusive of it: the abstractness of the void. Just as the degree-zero of the corporeal is the state of its indistinction with thought. The two zero degrees are in fact facets of the same multiplex excess-over. Stelarcian sensation, or suspended animation, is the human body-object in a corporeal vacuum state. It is the operative ur-idea of human corporeal existence. In Stelarc's suspended body, humanity-particles speed in and out of existence faster than can be perceived. Ideas, dreams, pains, yearnings, visions, needs, objectities and organlets, intelligences and instrumentalities, begin, abort and transform into each other. The vivid sensing by the flesh of a force previously taken for granted (gravity) induces a state of hypermutability, a hyperconnectibility that is blocked as soon as it is triggered. In sewn suspension, the limit-state of sensation, all outlet is blocked, so the felt trigger-force to which the body-matter has been sensitized cannot transduce into anything in particular. The sensation is all of them, singularly. Everything a body can do, everything a body can become: the condition of evolution. Disconnected. There is a suspension-variation in which sensation is doubled by a displaced action, as if toying with the idea of its perceptual reconnection and extension. That is the pulley suspension, where one hesitant, still counter-gravitational, outlet is allowed. The counter-gravitational function of locomotion is displaced from the legs to the arms, ensuring that the force of gravity is still uncommonly felt. The body is split, one side extending hesitantly into organic perception-action, the other side still steeped in the matter of sensation.
2). Operation: suspension/connection. Medium: the sensible concept as expression. Mode: transduction.
This is when the forces absorbed by the sensitized body just start to unfold again, to extend again beyond the skin (the base-line objective extent of human body-matter; the extensive envelope of human intensity at its default setting). This dimension overlaps with the first in the suspension events. The skin itself becomes a visible expression of the trigger-force ("gravitational landscape"), which also manifests as a sound-space. The resonation echoes. The extensive envelope of the intensive is re-extended as far as the walls. But it goes no further, because there is still no audience to walk away with the counter-gravitational event. Gravity has effectively transduced. It has been transformatively relayed into other forces, visibility and sound. But the relay is walled in, contained. Connection is re-established, only to be closed. The body begins to express in extension the force it was induced into sensing intensely, but the expression takes place in a communicational vacuum. The performances focusing most directly on the sensible concept as expression are the events for the "Amplified Body." "Amplified body processes include brainwaves (EEG), muscles (EMG), pulse (plethysmogram) and bloodflow (doppler flow meter). Other transducers and sensors monitor limb motion and indicate body posture. The body performs in a structured and interactive lighting installation which flickers and flares in response to the electrical discharges of the body ... Light is treated not as an external illumination of the body but as a manifestation of the body's rhythms." [n.d., "Stimbod"] Also expressive are "Hollow Body" events, in which the interior of the stomach, colon, and lungs is filmed with a miniature video camera [1994: 388]. The probes disable the default envelope of intensity by following the infolding of the skin into the body, through the orifices. The extension into visibility of the body's inside reveals its sensitive-intensive, palpitating interiority to be an infolded-- and unfoldable--exteriority that is as susceptible to transductive connection as any sampling of body-substance. The body is hollow. There is nothing inside--there is no inside as such for anything to be in, interiority being only a particular relationship of the exterior to itself (infolding). This highlights the non-actuality of sensation. Sensation, the substance of the body, is not the presence of the flesh in its envelope, but the presence in the flesh of an outside force of futurity (in this case, a portent of the asymmetrical symbiosis of the physiological and the technological as it extends to new frontiers).
3) Operation: relay. Medium: the sensible concept as contagion. Mode: transmission.
The body is no longer suspended. The door opens. The audience is let in, and the transduction is allowed to follow through. But to what effect? Certainly not yet the desired disproportionate effect. The audience of a Stelarc performance is not launched into outer space. It is induced into a state of stupor. Take a typical recent example ["Fractal Flesh. Split Body: Voltage-In/Voltage Out." Saw Gallery, Ottawa, September 1995]. There is little explanation of the nature of the event: no manifestos, no introductory remarks by the artist or a commentator, just a minimal hand-out with a brief explanation of the computer system that doesn't seem to reach most of those present. In any event, it is too dark to read it. The intent is evidently not to communicate in the sense of imparting information or interpretation. The event is basically unframed verbally, creating an air of uncertainty that quickly turns to foreboding, as a near-naked man walks silently onto the stage is helped into a cyborgian contraption. His body is peppered with electrodes connecting to the computer by wire. On his right arm is attached a robotic double of that limb. An assistant starts the computer program--and the left side of the body moves. That movement is closely followed by a gestural echo on the part of the robotic arm, as it whirrs in slightly delayed response to the movements of the left flesh- arm and leg. The body goes through a dissociated dance accompanied by even stranger sound effects, verging on music but not quite. As the performance proceeds, the pace of the movements increases, and with it the rhythm of the "music." By the end, the flesh on- stage is visibly exhausted, seeming to have endured a slowly intensifying pain throughout. Those in the audience who have managed to read the hand-out will know that the robotic arm wasn't responding directly to the left-side movements. There was an intervening relay. The computer was plugged by electrode into the left flesh-arm and leg (voltage in). The computer scrolled through a randomized sequence of electrode-stimulations, each programmed to produce a certain gesture. Electricity transduced into organic movement. The robotic arm was wired to right-side stomach and leg muscles (voltage out), controlled voluntarily in symphony with the involuntary left-side movements. Organic movement transduced back into electricity, and from there into mechanical movement. There was no explanation of the sounds. But the parallels between its rhythm and the pace and magnitude of the gestures suggested another bodily relay. In fact, the music was generated on the basis of electrical impulses picked up from the movement of the muscles and, as in the suspensions, the flow of blood through the body. The audience, whether or not they understood the details of the plug-ins and relays, were confronted with a compelling spectacle of the body made into a literal transducer relaying from an artificial intelligence to mechanical movement, and with the extraction of beautifully ghastly sound- expressions from the matter of the body, and with the openness of the wired body, pained, exhausted, austere, to inhuman forces vibrating through its flesh, and with the strangeness of its dissociated dance, so devoid of necessary function. The discomfort is palpable. The on-stage body's vulnerability has been communicated to the audience. Nervousness has replaced the initial uncertainty. No one speaks for awhile. Suspended, and restless. When conversation rebegins, a variety of responses are heard, ranging from outrage to excitement to bemusement to awe.
What has been communicated is not information or interpretation, not verbalized ideas. What has been transmitted is sensation itself, the body as sensible concept. The operation on the audience consists in inducing in them a momentary state of unhooked suspended animation, of stupor. The on-stage body has effectively transduced and relayed the force of electricity. But the audience is out of the electronic loop. Sensation is repeated as an excess-effect of the reconnection of the once-suspended body. It is doubled: once on stage in the openness and pathos of the artist's body; again in the stupor of the audience. Stupor is received sensation. Sensation is spun off, centrifugally, landing and reimplanting itself in the audience. Rather than reconnecting, the audience-bodies disconnect, in some small way entering a hypermutable state. After a moment, the spectators collect themselves and their thoughts, and translate the sensation into a divergence of emotionally-charged verbal ideas, as they walk away with the effects of the sensation. Is their verbalized reaction the same reaction they would have proferred before seeing the performance in response to a description of it? Has something extra-verbal happened, which has then transformatively unfolded into phonemes? Has something changed? Will there be a difference, even a slight divergence, in the way some of the spectators--newly sensitized to the electromagnetic forces--live their corporeal connectibility? The artist has tweaked. He has no mastery over the situation, no effective control over which ideas the spectators verbalize, or over how or if they subsequently connect. And he seems entirely unbothered by that fact, even pleased at the range and unpredictability of the responses. His project is induction and transduction. Meaning is incidental. (What would be the sense of performing, rather than reciting or writing, if meaning, the sensible concept out-thought, were the target medium of the concepts in play? "Information is the prosthesis that props up the obsolete body." [1996] Meaning, whether informative, interpretive or symbolic, props up the old body over the abyss of its obsolescence, adheres it to immediate past rather than disconnecting it for its futurity.) If the artist's project is induction and transduction, subsequent connection is the audience's project. Stelarc's art limits itself to being a science of indeterminate transmission. Rather than providing answers, it reposes the problem of the body's connectibiliy. What in particular is transmitted through that reposing is by design beyond the artist's contentedly limited powers. He does, however, have a general direction in mind-body. Outer space. But his transmissions will launch in that direction only if his desire is doubled many times over--only if the counter-gravitational compulsion animating the ur-idea of Stelarcian sensation is met, redoubled, and impossibly extended. Stelarc is prodding us. You can't blame a body for trying.
It is important to note that this kind of performance set-up stages sensation collectively. After all, human bodies never come in ones. A single body evolving is an absurdity. The individual, isolated body of the suspensions was a default position of sensation, just as the skin is the default container of human intensity. And just as the body has already extended beyond the skin, into a mutual prosthesis with matter, from its first perception, so too is the individual body always already plugged into a collectivity. "There is no focus on the individual ... words like 'I' are just a convenient shorthand for a complex interplay of social entities and situations." [1994: 381, 389] The isolation of the suspension events was a contrivance designed to return the body to its sensation, in order for it to re-extend into the always-already collective on a new footing. The conditions of sensation, like those of evolution, are fundamentally collective. Sensation, even as applied to an artifically isolated individual, is induced by collective stagings (the artist is always assisted) and, as a connective compulsion, always tends toward transductive contagion. To return to the point where mind rejoins the body, and the human rejoins matter, is to return to the point of indistinction between the individual and the collective--which is also the point of their emergent re-divergence. The Stelarcian project truly begins to unfold when the audience is let back in. The big result it tweakingly pursues involves a reinvention of the individual's relation to the collective. In this day and age, that involves a new kind of transductive connection between individuals, taken at least by twos, implemented through (collectively developed and deployed) technologies of communicative transmission. In other words, Stelarc's project is by nature cyberspatially oriented, and was so prospectively, before the fact. The bug-goggles were distant forerunners of the VR helmet. 4) Operation: interconnection. Medium: experimentation. Mode: extension (prosthesis).
A different dimension is reached when the audience is invited to participate in the performance, as with the goggles and other early events. This sometimes overlaps with the kind of performance dedicated overall to transmission, as just described. A member of the audience might be invited to key into the computer a sequence of gestures, or even to be hooked to the electrodes and share the sensation directly. But it comes into its own with the Internet events. In the Internet reposing of "Fractal Flesh. Split Body: Voltage- In/Voltage Out" [November 1995], the computer attached to the electrodes was plugged into the World Wide Web. The body and the Third Arm were in Luxembourg, and people in seven cities around the world were invited to gather at specially networked terminals and remotely control the body's gestures. Others everywhere were encouraged to log in through their regular Internet connections. The audience is let into the loop. It becomes part of the performance. The distance between the performer and the spectator is remotely abolished. Sensation has unfolded into a trans-individual feed-back loop of action-reaction, stimulus-response. "Electronic space becomes a medium of action rather than information." [1996; n.d, "High-Fidelity Illusion"]. Action-perception is welcomed back. Since the situation is still entirely needless and useless, since it is outside established, regularized tried-and-true action-perception circuits, this is not a full-fledged return to analysis-in-action. The performance uses instrumental reason to set up an experimental exercise in operative reason. In this mix with instrumentality, operative reason dominates. The action-perception circuits opened are tried, but in no sense "true." For they still precede their logical possibility. The performance potentializes a material interconnection of bodies. What, if anything, will unfold from it in the way of instrumentally reasonable uses and needs is unforeseeable, a sheer futurity that will only come to pass after an indefinite series of subsequent reposings of the same problem in varying conjunctions. What new possibilities will this serially expanding transductive activation of electronic space produce for the human collectivity? Stelarcian potential just begins to repossibilize, in an evolutionary direction.
The form in which the emergent possibilities begin to express themselves is futurist speculation. In accompanying written material posted on Stelarc's Website, speculation is encouraged on the eventual uses of remote actuation. Space travel, of course, figures large. Possible uses of other Stelarcian set-ups are also brought into the picture. The "Hollow Body," for example, returns in a possible scenario of nanotechnological symbiosis as technology is implanted in the innermost folds of the body. Could this, combined with prostheses applied to the external envelope of the body, extend not only the spatial parameters of life beyond the earth's gravitational field but also its time parameters beyond their normal limits, making free-floating cyborg immorality a possibility as human organs are supplemented or supplanted by technological objects? [1994: 391] The fantastic solution-cases for the problems posed by Stelarcian sensation begin to order themselves into a future-combinatoric. But these are impossible possibilities, uses predicated on as-yet undeveloped technology. Disengaged, only-thought possibilities rise like a shadowy vapor directly from the ferment of potential, skipping over the necessary intervening steps through instrumental-developmental action- perception. Impossible possibilities are prospective shadows. This is not a utopian moment, because it does not matter, to the artist or anyone else, if anyone really takes them seriously--yet.
What is important is not the fantastic solution-cases themselves, but the new and compelling problem their speculation poses. Should these disengaged possibilities engage, should the things, objects, organs, thoughts and anticipations they shadow come to stand by them, together with new operative and instrumental interconnections--will we still be human? Can humanity tweak itself into a new existence? The only way anyone will ever know is if the human collectivity applies itself to the development of the intervening technologies, which are then set up to sensitize and potentialize humanity-particles toward launching themselves instrumentally into their own futurity. By then, anyone (or anything) in a position to know will no longer be human. Effective knowledge of these disengaged solution-cases is humanly impossible. Which is why they are necessarily the stuff of futurist speculation. In any case, the knowledge will be attained by someone or something only if there is a sufficiently shared desire among humans for the launch, a strong enough collective compulsion. It won't happen through an application of knowledge of outcomes, and it won't happen through natural selection. It will only happen through desire. Desire is the sufficient condition of evolution. Natural selection is only evolution's unfolding. And all reflective knowledge of evolution is by nature retrospective.
When Stelarcian sensation begins to unfold, it is in a new counter-gravitational landscape in which the relations between the possible and the impossible, desire and instrumental reason, instrumental reason and reflective analysis, and instrumental reason and operative reason, have been reconfigured in an evolution-ready manner.
It needs to be emphasized that the activation of information operates through the sensitization of the human body-matter to electromagnetic force. More than a container of information, cyber-"space" is a dynamic medium of transduction. Computer-assisted transductive interconnection is literally and materially a potentialization. The informational content of that connection, the meaning of the words and images transmitted, is only important as a trigger or catalyst. Information is but a local bit-player in the project of inducing a global transformation-effect whose reason is of another order. Immediately after the Internet version of "Fractal Flesh" Stelarc began tentative plans for another net-event that would bring this to expression [1995b]. This time, the body would be plugged into the network in such a way that its gestures would be controlled by the mass of information traveling the wires. Internet activity would be monitored by the home computer, which would transmit variations in the informational mass to the electrodes for transduction into variations in the rhythm of the body's movements. By plugging into information as a mass, information itself is transformed to impinge only as a force. In this event, the body is once again suspended. It alone feels the future-force of information. The involuntary movements induced are not relayed into action or fed-back to other bodies. The body becomes a resonating vessel for the force of information, to which it is now singularly sensitized. This device re-poses the zero-degree of sensation, tailored to the cyber-level of the body.
As the transformed return of sensation illustrates once again, the dimensions of the Stelarcian Quadruplex are not "periods" in the artist's work adding up to an evolution. They are a continually varying, operative foldings into and out of each other. All are present, potentially, differentially, in each. There is, however, have a logical order of precedence indicated by the numbering. The fact that the dimension of incipient extension is last both logically and chronologically is an accident of history. It was actually portended first, in the goggles. The technological conditions for even its tentative unfolding were simply absent in pre-cyberian 1970. Stelarc's project has to do with reproducing the conditions of evolution. Those conditions are not evolution itself. They are of a different order. The project cannot accurately be said to evolve, only to serially re-pose, at most beginning to unfold. The "reproduction" of the conditions of evolution are a reproblematization of them. For in an immortalized cyborg future-present, natural selection would no longer be the operative principle of evolutionary unfolding. The old way of generating evolutionary solution-cases will no longer obtain.
What Stelarc is projecting is a post-evolutionary evolution of the human. Paradoxically, post-evolution will only be achieved by an actualization of the conditions of evolution, such that what comes "first"--sensation as corporeal potential--also comes last, and what is infolded unfolds as is, as non-objective and asubjective, not-yet thought and action, both individual and collective, pre- and posthuman (everything a human body can do or become--bar human). The alchemical trick is to induce a temporal feed-back loop, making the moments or dimensions of the project operatively self-referential as it unfolds: material, qualitative auto-transformation, at once multiplex and global. In extension.
Stelarc's human body-object: "stretched between what it never was and what it can never hope to be" [1984: 153]. Pre- and posthuman.
"Time to vanish." [1984: 70].
HUMAN DISPERSAL
The term "prosthesis" should be used advisedly. In this context, it is a misnomer. "Prosthesis" as commonly used refers to the replacement of an organ with an artifical double designed to fulfill the same function. Prostheses are need and utility oriented, and belong to an order of substitution. The possibilities for organic functioning precede the fabrication of the prosthesis. The actual artifact is an image (a sensible concept) of a set of restorable organic functions. In other words, the prosthesis is the sensible concept of a pre-set system of possibility. It never leaves the orbit of the organic human body-object.
The operation in play in Stelarc's project, on the other hand, has to do with extension rather than substitution. On the other hand: exactly. The robotic Third Arm is attaches to the right flesh-arm rather than replacing it. It is a "prosthesis" in the etymological sense of the word: "to put in addition to." As an addition, it belongs to an order of superposition. The tendency of Stelarc's events is toward superposition. The body is probed so that its inside is also an exterior. The body inputs information to the computer in order to express it or relay it as a force: the body places itself between information and force. The left side of the body receives programmed gestures fed in from a machine, which it then transduces into involuntary gestures: programmed and involuntary. The right of the body relays muscular movement into mechanical movement: organism and machine. Computer and robotic arm. Sensation and purposive functioning.
This is Stelarc's "Fractal Body." In the cyborg fourth dimension, the serial probings, sensitizations, expressions, transductions, relays, and transmissions of the body are coaxed into co-presence with each other. All of the operations are held in ready reserve, as randomly accessible openings. The body as RAO (random-access opening) can connect in any number of ways to itself, its objects, and other bodies. It can open, split and reconnect at any point, inside or out. It is no longer an objective volume, but an extendability. Its dimensionality has increased beyond the three of spatial presence: from the three-dimensions of the voluminous, to the fourth dimension of the extensile. Except that this "fourth" dimension is actually fractal, between dimensions. Split and extend: the basic operation used to generate fractal figures. The "fractalization" of the body is no metaphor. It is an operation: the ur-operation of the posthuman.
The operation of fractalization is posthuman because featured prominently among its "ands" is subject and object. In the Internet event, the body acted as an instrumentally acting subject when it sent out meaningful information and installed remote-control terminals. In return, as a sensitizable object, it gathered back information felt as a controlling force. The loops of the net allowed it to be a subject and object simultaneously and asymmetrically. Of course, the body is always and asymmetricallly both a subject and an object. But in normal human mode, it is a subject for itself, and an object for others. Here, it is a subject and an object for itself--self-referentially. The one accustomed conjunction in which a human subject is also an object for itself is in reflective thought. Reflective thought aspires to self-mirroring symmetry. The networked coincidence of subject-object is neither reflective nor self-mirroring, but operative and relaying. The "self" of this self-referentiality is of a qualitatively different kind, one that operationally includes in its being for itself other individual human body-selves, as well as computers and phone-lines and electromagnetism, and any number of heterogeneous elements. The body-self has been plugged into an extended network. As fractal subject- object, the body is the network--a self-network.
It was asserted earlier that the body and its objects were prostheses of each other, and that matter itself was prosthetic. The fractal body brings prosthesis, this extensile mutuality, to full expression. It is precisely the full expression of this aspect of the human that makes it posthuman. The self-network expresses extendability to a degree beyond the human pale. But extensile mutuality is also before the human pale: it is a characteristic of every perceiving thing. Thus the extension into the posthuman is a bringing to full expression of a pre-humanity of the human. It is the limit-expression of what the human shares with everything that it is not: a bringing out of its inclusion in matter, its belonging in the same self-referential material world in which every being unfolds. The potential cyborg extensions of the human, once it has entered a hypermutably open state, are existentially unbounded. The self-network is a worlding of the human. The moon's the limit. Or maybe not. Having counteracted the earth's force of gravity, the posthuman body-world is in its own orbit: the becoming-planetary of the human.
The speculative limit is not merely the envelope of the earth's atmosphere. More than a spatial bound, the limit is a critical self-conversion point bearing on the mode of existence of the human. Modally, the limit is self-organization--the self-network extended to encompass all aspects of what is, by virtue of that extension, ex-human life. So that the body doesn't ever have to plug in. Wherever it goes, it is pre-plugged. The Media Lab's dream of ubiquitous interface come fantastically true [Negroponte]. The ex-human is now a node among nodes. Some nodes are still composed of organic body-matter, some are silicon-based, and others, like the ancestral robotic arm, are alloy. The body-node sends, receives, and transduces, in concert with every other node. The network is infinitely self- connectible, thus infinitely plastic. The shape and directions it takes are not centrally decided, but emerge from the complex interplay of its operations. The self-organizing network is the embodiment of operative reason expanded to fill the world. A brave new world--even if it never does get around to leaving the earth's orbit.
This is the fundamental direction in which the Stelarcian project extends intelligence: the encompassing of instrumental reason in a system of operative reason tending toward pan-planetary reach. Instrumental reason is and remains highly relevant. How relevant reflective thought remains is not so certain. It is this uncertainty in particular that problematizes agency. The base meaning of the word "agency" in this context is the expression of intelligence in needful or useful action. Stelarc's proto-self- networking "Fractal Body" events do not deny agency. Quite the contrary, they multiply it. Emergently. The extension into action has not fully unfolded. No use or need is actually fulfilled. "Movement" is a better term for this than "action," with movement understood as an intermediacy between the vacuum "activation" of sensation and object- oriented action-perception. The "Fractal Body" events catch agency in movement.
Stelarc cites four kinds of movement in operation: voluntary, involuntary, controlled, and programmed. [1992: 26]. Each is in turn multiple, arising in different ways at various points in the relay system. In the audience performance with Third Arm, voluntary movement figures in the setting up of the stage, the donning of the contraption, and the inputting of the computer commands, as well as in the performing body itself, as when it untangles wires, subtly changes posture to relieve fatigue, or improvises expressive gestures. Voluntary movement exercises reflective thought and/or analysis-in- action. Involuntary movement is of course present in the usual organic functionings of the body's autonomic nervous system. But it is also produced in the robotic arm in response to transduced electric signals received from electrodes registering voluntary muscle contractions in the stomach and right leg. In this set-up, involuntary movement is extended from the human to the machinic by way of strictly bracketted voluntary movements--"already the beginnings of a symbiosis between the human and technology" [1992: 26]. The movements of the left-side arm and leg are controlled by the electrode stimulation. Finally, the parameters of the robotic arm's movement are programmed.
Any of these movements can be modulated. For example, the controlled arm and leg movements runs a continuum from "prompting" to full "actuation" depending on the intensity of the transmitted electromagnetic force. [n.d., "Stimbod"] They can also form mixes: at any level below full actuation, the body can voluntarily inflect the controlled movement by offering resistance to the stimulated movement, or by following through on its momentum, extending or exaggerating it. They can in addition occupy any node in a relay system, or more than one node at once. With multiple relays or feedback, the same node can exercise more than one mode of movement at the same time.
The point is that while voluntary movement is necessary, it is in no way sufficient. It takes its place in a proto-self-network whose effectivity depends on the working in concert of all four modes, and whose combined mode of intelligent exercise can only be characterized as operative, the most ecumenical of reasons. Of the four modes, human agency is only recognizably present in the voluntary. The hallmark of the human is subsumed in the transductive relaying. More than that, it occupies a gap in the relay. It inhabits the "split," in this example between the computer-programmed left-side movements and the muscle-controlled mechanical movements of the Third Arm. From the network's point of view, human will is an interruptor. It is a point of transductive indeterminacy that enters the network as a local input of free variation: in other words, a variation not subordinated to the overall organizational principles of the self-network, but rather captured or assimilated by them (the variation is "free" in the sense that it is a given for the network, which itself expends nothing to produce it). Interruption of the operative principles of reason, indeterminacy, given variation: the properly human is the unconscious of the network. The way in which voluntary inputs are captured, transduced and networked is a technological symptom of the ex-human. That symptom does not register in the network in the mode in which it is input. It is input as will, intention, meaning, but is assimilated as motion. The humanity of the human is symptomatically transduced from the register of reflection and meaning to that of energy. As part of the same global transformation by which the human body becomes planetary, its humanity is translated into a local force. It is only as a local force that the properly human is registered, becomes conscious (operationally present) to the worlding network. Once the speculative pan-planetary self-network was up and running, all of this even would even apply to the human input of computer commands, and even to the programming of protocols. For in a decentralized network it would only be certain program modules that would be manipulable from any given node. There would be no single point at which the network as a whole could be reprogrammed.
In the self-organizing network, the human is no longer master and no longer central. Neither is it exactly peripheralized. It is subsumed. In a self-organizing network, there is no center or periphery, only nodes. The human is fractalized, dispersed across the nodes and transversed by them all in the endless complexity of relay. The human is neither "all-here" nor "all-there" [n.d., "Stimbod"], neither inexistent nor fully itself. It is part-here and part-there, symptomatically transduced and transformed.
It was argued earlier that the "pre-" and the "post-" coincide in the evolutionary condition. This is easy to see in the self-network. The human body-node can transduce any mode of movement at any time. Its just-past perception or exercise of agency might be the next node's about-to-be mode, and vice versa. The trigger-force of electromagnetism can travel instantaneously from any point in the network to any other. The past and future of any particular node have already unfolded elsewhere in the network. Not just its immediate past and future. Middling and remote pasts and futures also flicker across the web. The particular node's entire combinatoric of possibility is actually present in dispersion. Not "engaged" with the present--electromagnetically embodied in it. But an actual possibility is not a possibility, so much as a potential. But potential is by nature infolded. These "potentials" are extended. To complicate things even more, possibilities-or-potentials of agencies the human body-node never were and can never hope to be (for example a computer program or a mass of information or a robotic limb) are also looming just over the next node. Possibility and potential collapse into actual conjunction. They are actualized, in mixture, in a melding of analytic thought and the forces of matter. A new mode of extended existence--an actuality of excess-over the actual--is invented by the dispersal of agency. The dispersed co-presence of networked possibilities-potentials should not be seen as a mire of indistinction or a short-circuiting of change. It is not indistinction, but an order of dispersed superposition that in fact represents heightening of differentiation, since every node will occupy an absolutely singular conjuncture in the complex, transductive, superpositive flow. And rather than a short-circuiting of change, it is its actual embodiment: the self-organizing ebb and flow of agency-transfer makes the network a continuum of variation.
Will any of this ever happen? Should it ever happen? Doesn't this whole discussion ignore the impoverished, and most especially non-Western, bodies that will be passed over in the postevolutionary rush, consigned to abject humanity on a thoroughly trashed planet? Doesn't this beg the questions of power and inequality? These are legitimate reflective questions, to which the majority of us still-humans would probably answer "no," "no," "yes," "yes." But they are beside the problem. Not at all beside the point, but beside the problem. The problem, which Stelarc's art both expresses and exacerbates, is that the process has already begun. However far the Media Lab is from achieving its dream-interface, however far the Internet is from the apocalyptic possible futures speculated for it, however incompletely the new media have been implanted, however faltering is their present state of interconnection, the modal conversion of the human has sensibly begun. The Stelarcian body answers the nagging questions about it with a "yes," "yes," "not necessarily," "maybe-maybe not." The reflective critical thinker starts and ends with "no" in the name of justice. The experimenter in criticality starts from "yes" in the name of sensation, and leaves it open. The Stelarcian desire is to affirm the conversion, not in order to denigrate the importance of the human justice issues it incontestably raises, but rather to enable them to be reposed and operated upon in an entirely new problematic. This is a socially irresponsible position only if the critical thinker can answer an unhedged "yes" to this counter-question: if all of this doesn't happen, will there be an end to impoverishment and inequality and will the earth not be trashed? Until that affirmation is forthcoming, there is no argument, only a clash of desires. Two desires implicating divergent modes of existence: affirmed ex-human intensity, and all-too-human negative moralism. Works Cited
All parenthetical citations in the text are to Stelarc unless otherwise noted.
Bergson, Henri.
------1911. Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell. London: Macmillan.
------1946. The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Audison. New York: Philosophical Library.
------1988. Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press.
Marsh, Anne. 1993. Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia 1969-92. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Pages 105-115.
Negroponte, Nicholas. 1995. Being Digital. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers.
-------1984. Order Out of Chaos. New York: Bantam.
-------1988. Entre le temps et l'éternit. Paris: Fayard.
Stelarc:
-------n.d. Stelarc Website. http://www.merlin.com.au/stelarc.
-------1983. "The Body Obsolete: Paul McCarthy Interviews Stelarc." High Performance, no. 24, pp. 14-19.
-------1984. Obsolete Body/Suspensions/Stelarc, ed. James D. Paffrath and Stelarc. Davis, California: JP Publications.
-------1988. Artists' statement. In "The Function in Art and Culture Today." High Performance, no. 11 (Spring/Summer), p. 70.
--------1992. "Portrait robot de l'homme-machine," interview with Jean-Yves Katelan. L'Autre journal, no. 27 (September), pp. 24-41.
--------1994. Interview with Martin Thomas. In Electronic Arts in Australia, ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg. Continuum, vol. 8, no. 1. Pages 376-393.
--------1995a. "Extended-Body: Interview with Stelarc." Paolo Atzore and Kirk Woolford. CTheory (on-line journal)
--------1995b. Interview with Rosanne Bersten. Internet.au (GET DATE), pages 34-35.
--------1995c. Conversation with the artist. December 1995.
--------1996. "From Psycho to Cyber Strategies: Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence." Kunst Forum. [GET CITE]
Virilio, Paul:
--------1992. "Rat de laboratoire." L'Autre Journal, no. 27 (September), pp. 31-33.
--------1995. The Art of the Motor, trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pages 109-119.