by Mark Dery
Oddly, issues of power are absent from Stelarc’s postevolutionary schematic, as they inevitably are in McLuhan’s writings; technology intersects with the body but never collides with social or economic issues. Who builds these machines, anyway? Sheathed in an impregnable exoskeleton, the Stelarcian cyborg is powerful but not empowered, a pharaonic monument to the mummylike body withering inside it. Its mind, meanwhile, is elsewhere; most posthumans are, after all, “mere manipulators of machine images” who live out eternity by proxy, directing robot colonies on distant planets.38 But who writes the code that creates the “high-fidelity illusion of tele-existence?” Who controls the remote controllers? What is needed here is a politics of posthumanism. Stelarc’s art and thought do not exist, as he would have it, in the value-free cultural vacuum traditionally reserved for science. His science fiction dream of a body that is no longer “a site for . . . the social” is hemmed in on all sides by feminist body criticism, the ongoing debate over the ethics of human biotechnology, and green critiques of capitalism’s litanies of technological progress and unchecked expansion.
Stelarc seems unaware that his discourse is caught in the cross fire of the culture wars. “The events are to do with ideas, not ideologies,” he insists. “The artist refrains from the politics of power not through a naivety of the implications and issues, but because the focus is on the imaginative postevolutionary possibilities.”39 His speculations “emanate from the events,” he argues, and are “not meant to be a balanced and comprehensive theory”; they are “about the business of being poetic rather than . . . politically persuasive.”
By retaining the poetic license of the artist, he exempts himself from the scientific requirement that theories be unified. Simultaneously, and contrarily, he sanctions only literal interpretations of his work; figurative readings are dismissed as dependent on the very context-the realm of “the psyche [and] the social”–from which postevolutionary strategies are meant to map an escape route. Accordingly, he invokes a scientific objectivity that forecloses social or political readings of his work. “Suspicious of subjective reporting,” “skeptical about statements of memory which are often very loose, inexact and difficult to evaluate,” and wary “of romanticizing and exaggerating past actions,” he legitimates his posthumanist pronouncements and McLuhanesque epigrams with technical terminology and a dispassionate tone.40
But the very notion of ideation unperturbed by ideology, of a social space in which the collision of bodies and machines takes place outside “the politics of power,” is science fiction. The idea that truth is as much socially constructed as discovered-that is, that even avowedly value-neutral discourses are colored by cultural assumptions-is the keynote of recent critiques of science. Science and technology “are not isolated from ideological influence but are ‘part and parcel, woof and warp, of the social orders from which they emerge and which support them,’” argues the cultural critic Claudia Springer.41
It is his embrace of a “context-free” scientific objectivity that prevents Stelarc from seeing the correspondence between his cybernetic spectacles and what he terms the “new mysticism” of a culture dazzled by a “bewildering array of disconnected data.”42 Stelarc has called his events “sci-fi scenarios for human-machine symbiosis . . . performance as simulation rather than ritual.”43 But the distinction may be semantic; computer simulations may be the rituals of cyberculture.
Fakir Musafar questions Stelarc’s privileging of science fictions over “cultural rituals that have long outlived their purposes.” A Silicon Valley advertising executive-turned-“modern primitive,” Musafar has attained altered states through piercing, binding, suspension by hooks through his flesh, and other forms of what he calls “body play”; modern primitives, he holds, constitute a cultural vanguard showing “[a] way out of the Middle Ages and European culture and a fusion of science and magic.”44
Where I think Stelarc is missing the point is that. . . [w]e’ve gotten to the point where we can synthesize magic, technology and science. You listen to the babblings of the best physicists we have today, [and] they . . . sound like the alchemists used to.45
Additionally, there are correlations between Stelarc’s work and Judeo-Christian symbolism. The artist’s declaration that “[t]echnology, which shatters the body’s subjective totality of reality, now returns to reintegrate its fragmented experience”–a restatement, in all the essentials, of McLuhan’s claim that “[a]fter three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding”–invites interpretation as an allegorical return to a para-disal state, to a time before the rupture between self and Other, culture and nature.46
Rachel Rosenthal, a feminist performance artist whose works often address the politics of the body, theorizes Stelarc’s cyber-body events as “[n]ostalgia for undifferentiation.” In her essay “Stelarc, Performance and Masochism,” she writes,
We are so isolated from the [O]ther, so lonely. Self-penetration, physical and violent, is a metaphysical response to this despair of ever connecting deeply. So we . . . pierce the separating membrane. We explode the integrity of form.47
For McLuhan, the invention of the written word was the “separating membrane,” dividing the “I” from the “all-that-is-not-I” and casting Western civilization into the postlapsarian world of isolation, objectivity, and rationality. His limning of this event sounds unmistakably like the biblical allegory of the fall:
The whole man became fragmented man; the alphabet shattered the charmed circle and resonating magic of the tribal world, exploding man into an agglomeration of specialized and psychically impoverished individuals, or units, functioning in a world of linear time and Euclidean space.48
By extension, McLuhan’s conviction that “[w]e have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us” equates the preliterate with the prelap-sarian, the supposedly holistic worldview of pretechnological civilizations with an Edenic state of grace.49
Stelarc vehemently rejects such analyses. “Can strategies be evaluated without resorting to convenient myths, metaphors and religious symbolism?” he demands.50 To which one might well respond, “Can poetic extrapolations based on technological modernity–science fictions, by any other name-be disentangled from the meshwork of shared references that links all texts, religious myths among them?”
A sworn atheist, Stelarc discourages quests for mythic resonances in his rhetoric. But his postevolutionary strategies spring from McLuhan, whose later thought is inflected by a Teilhardian scientific humanism; can a posthumanism so deeply indebted to an analysis of electronic culture that borders on the mystical expunge every last trace of that mysticism? As the noted historian of religion Mircea Eliade points out, “It is interesting to observe to what an extent the scenarios of initiation still persist in many of the acts and gestures of contemporary nonreligious man.”51 Viewed as mythopoeia, Stelarc’s dream of the end of limits (“the body must burst from its biological, cultural and planetary containment”) is easily recast as an ascension rite for cyberculture, a vertical movement from the mundane to the “high-fidelity illusion of tele-existence.” It is Jacob’s ladder reimagined for an age of “patched-up”–and patched-in-people. The artist’s speculation that self-engineered evolution may result “in an alien awareness-one that is posthistoric, transhuman and even extraterrestrial” calls to mind Eliade’s assertion that
[t]he ‘most high’ is a dimension inaccessible to man as man; it belongs to superhuman forces and beings. He who ascends by mounting the steps of a sanctuary or the ritual ladder that leads to the sky ceases to be a man; in one way or another, he shares in the divine condition.52
On a lighter note, Stelarc’s cyborg myth dovetails with Roland Barthes’s playful essay on the French superhero the jet-man, a posthuman pilot whose helmet and antigravity suit (“a novel type of skin in which ‘even his mother would not know him’”) signal a “m
etamorphosis of species,” the coming of “jet-mankind.”53 He writes, “Everything concurs, in the mythology of the jet-man, to make manifest the plasticity of the flesh.”54 Barthes sees in the jet-man’s impersonal, asexual uniform and “abstention and withdrawal from pleasures” a monastic regimen, a mortification of the flesh whose endpoint is “the glamorous singularity of an inhuman condition.”55 The myth of the jet-man, he emphasizes, is no less a religious allegory for its Rocketeer gadgetry. “[I]n spite of the scientific garb of this new mythology,” notes Barthes, “there has merely been a displacement of the sacred.”56
D. A. Therrien: Machines for the New Inquisition
“We create new rituals with every generation,” says D. A. Therrien. “[T]here’s really no difference between [believing in] multiple gods and believing in multiple sciences or technologies.”57 He elaborates, “We’ve looked at technology, at least since the industrial revolution and maybe even since Newton, as almost a second religion. Religion is supposed to unify you with a greater whole and technology offers that same Utopian vision.”
His serious, finely drawn features framed by dark, Jesus-length locks and dominated by piercing eyes and a Mephistophelian goatee, Therrien looks like central casting’s idea of a defrocked preacher. Fittingly, the postmodern theorist Arthur Kroker has dubbed him “a priest of high technology” whose cybernetic spectacles are “deeply religious” in their “ethical insistence that technology respond to the ultimate questions.”58 In his tableaux of command and control, says Therrien, “politics and religion [are] the same thing.”59 He plugs the discourse of technology into “the context of religion and belief systems” and, in so doing, into the “politics of power” from which Stelarc stands aloof.
“Technology enables the few to dominate the many,” he asserts. “It’s used the same way that religion has been used-as a power mechanism. Maybe, as networking starts to happen on a larger scale, there will be more input from the user, but right now, corporations essentially control technology and by doing so, they tend to have the power. You know, we may think we’re empowered by the fact that we sit in front of computers for eight hours a day, but is that really freeing us? Technologies are enabling people but at the same time government and industry want to control the technologies that enable the masses.”
Inverting the McLuhan paradigm embraced by Stelarc, Therrien stresses the perception of media as social rather than biological extensions of humankind, underscoring their use as instruments of societal domination rather than individual liberation. To Stelarc, the body is no longer “a site for . . . the social but rather . . . a structure to be monitored and modified”; to Therrien, for whom history is too often a story of masses monitored and modified from on high, the body cannot but be a site for the social, a screen on which power is projected.
Therrien’s ensemble, Comfort/Control, performs high-voltage exorcisms that partake equally of the concentration camp and the Stations of the Cross. Young men wearing nothing but jockstraps huddle in cages or hang on monolithic metal crosses while the percussionist Timothy North rumbles on tom-toms or raps out sputtering rhythms on their prostrate bodies, using electrified drumsticks. Set in a twilight relieved only by explosions of light so dazzling they seem to cauterize the eyes, the events take place amidst industrial pandemonium: North’s unrelenting assault is accented by digital samples of mechanical wheezings and rusty scrapings.
There is something, in this Foucauldian theater of discipline and punishment, of 1984’s Room 101, behind whose door lay the terrors of the subconscious, and of the neurophysiologist Jose Delgado’s experiments with mind control, in which implanted electrodes were used to control animal behavior. Examined in an art-historical context, Comfort/Control’s performances bear a family resemblance to those of Barry Schwartz, an Oakland, California-based artist whose work reconciles performance art, weird science, and avant-garde music. Schwartz’s electro-acoustic spectacles incorporate Tesla coils-awesome devices that bathe the room in an unearthly, purplish glow and fill the air with long, ribbonlike sparks-and a homemade structure called the Harp: electrified piano wires fastened, at one end, to insulators mounted on the ceiling and at the other to insulators anchored in a ten-foot-square tub filled with transformer fluid. Sloshing around in galoshes, the artist plucks the Harp with heavy-duty rubber gloves, their fingertips capped with thimbles. Setting the wires jangling, he calls forth burrs and bumbles reminiscent of wind in telephone lines. Fiery glowworms spring, sputtering, from his metal fingertips, inch their way up the wires, and vanish, forming rungs of flame as they ascend. Inescapably evocative of the Frankenstein myth, Schwartz’s theater of shocks and jolts reminds us that the electricity that makes technological modernity possible is an elemental force. Loosed from its man-made cage, it becomes, once again, a capricious anima, a puissant flame.
Comfort/Control invites comparison, as well, to La Fura dels Baus (“Vermin of the Sewers”), an all-male troupe from Barcelona whose Mad Max masques involve chainsaw-wielding, jockstrap-clad gladiators and the bloody carcasses of meat animals, and to the obsessive, ingrown work of the Los Angeles artist Liz Young, whose installation Neglected Fixations (1990) featured a man in a human-sized hamster wheel, condemned to the Sisyphean torment of endlessly walking, never arriving.
Comfort/Control’s 1990 performance Ritual Mechanics geome-trized power relations and mechanized primitive rites. Presented at Cy-berArts International, an art and technology symposium-cum-trade show, the performance took place in Los Angeles’s Mayan Theater nightclub, a converted movie palace decorated to look like a Mayan temple. Towering in front of the gaping, craggy maw of a trompe l’oeil cavern on a painted backdrop stood the Index, a forty-foot-tall, three-ton mechanical cross with two men imprisoned in its cagelike frame. Resembling a cross between a rocket gantry and a Vietnamese tiger cage, the cruciform sculpture incorporated an alphanumeric display into its base; words calculated to push emotional buttons–“SANCTIFY,” “DEIFY,” “ELECTRIFY,” “CONTROL,” “CONFORM,” “CONVERT”—scrolled across its six-foot-square neon grid.
One of the Index’s hapless prisoners, Lloyd Whittaker, hung upside down in the Ninety-Degree Machine, a harrowing device that gradually raised him perpendicular to the cross’s upright shaft, then brought him whistling down, into a steel plate. The contraption’s impact triggered bone-jarring digital samples-what Therrien calls “good, gut-ripping sounds: tree trunks snapping, judo throws.” Michael Hudson-the Body Drum-lay at the foot of the Index, his prone form conjuring images of human sacrifice; strapped to his chest were electrified, heavily insulated steel plates fitted with electronic triggers. There were 240 volts and “200 amps of good, chunky power running through each plate,” says Therrien, with relish-enough power to kill, perilously close to the heart. Pummeling them with pieces of steel pipe held in heavy gloves, North closed the circuit with each thwack, spattering sparks in every direction and triggering samples.
A single Macintosh computer used MIDI sequencing software and fiber-optic control/data links to orchestrate what Therrien describes as a “technically quite complex” performance, synchronizing sampled sounds stored on the computer’s hard disk, machine control, and lighting. Performed in near darkness, Ritual Mechanics was illuminated at intervals by searing bursts from banks of quartz lights.
Since 1983, Therrien has traced the triangle of power, bodies and technology in cyberculture. The name of his loose aggregate of per-formers-Therrien and North are the only constants-refers, he says, “to the enveloping comfort that machines provide [by] taking control out of human hands. Comfort/Control is about the ways that people interface with technology, and how technology is eventually going to supplant not only a lot of human physical activity but a lot of our decision making as well. The danger may not be apparent, but I think we’ll reach a stage where technology starts to supersede our intelligence. In my work, I [create] a situation where the machines are in control and the humans in them have no control whatsoever. They’re unwilli
ng participants.”
Their hair slicked back with a glutinous mixture of grease, paint, and flour, their bodies streaked with tempera paint, and flour from head to toe, the trapped, traumatized acolytes in Ritual Mechanics convey multiple meanings. They could be sacrificial offerings inside a technopagan Wicker Man; guinea pigs in unspeakable medical experiments; victims of a postapocalyptic Inquisition; or the sado-mechanical, electro-fetishistic practitioners of Ballard’s “new sexuality born from a perverse technology.” Most obviously, they call to mind Japanese butoh dancers who dust themselves with rice flour to become white shadows in a grotesque “dance of utter darkness,” an elegy to the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Therrien fastens meanings of his own to this chain of associations. In Nomad magazine, he points out that in Ritual Mechanics
there is the person who is drumming on the human body [and] the . . . person who is being drummed upon. The dominant person . . . shows that there is usually one dominant force behind a lot of the dogma that runs the machine. [W]hether that [person] is a pope or a dictator, there is still someone who is driving the agenda, and . . . everyone else is . . . just along for the ride. [That’s the] idea with the caged man. It’s more than just the caged body: often, it’s the caged intellect that you are dealing with, where that intellect is trapped in that machine.60
