In the lecture Stelarc “experiments with alternate anatomical architectures and with the consequences these have for awareness, subjectivity and identity.” For more information on Stelarc’s work visit the artist’s website and/or read an article about his work on London Theatre Blog.

Another keyword used in the lecture was ‘organic’, a term that Stanislavski himself was apparently fond of. Around the turn of the 20th century, the connotation of the word ‘organic’ would have differed from its current counterpart. Today’s English language usage, linked with the food industry, is set in contrast to industrial or genetically modified substances. In Stanislavski’s day, it may well have resonated with a pre-industrial idea of nature – but without further etymological and historical probing it’s difficult to say.

Another problem in understanding shifts in the popular perception of biology is understanding the means by which the advances in its field of research filter into popular discourse. Do changes of perception come straight from scientific/technological developments, or are they filtered through popular art forms and cultural outlets, including in this case the theatre?

Following the lecture, I began thinking about the significance of biology in our perception of the performer on stage; and how important the perception and knowledge of biological function is to the actor today. I also began questioning the Stanislavski/Benedetti notion of biology and the body in light of scientific innovations in the field of nanobiotechnology. Is the Stanislavskian vision of a ‘biological’ actor on the verge of obsolescence?

In the 4th century B.C., Aristotle placed great importance on the imitation of life as the key to dramatic representation. In chapter 2 of his Poetics, he writes “since the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type…it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are. It is the same in painting. Polygnotus depicted men as nobler than they are, Pauson as less noble, Dionysius drew them true to life.” (Aristotle, Poetics Chap 2, 48a) Aristotle’s notion of ‘biology’ and particularly his anatomical understanding of the body would have been limited to the work of scientists of the time; figures like Hippocrates who had a basic overall understanding of human musculoskeletal structure but relied more on speculation than empirical observation as to the internal functions of the human body. With that in mind, It’s a fair guess to say that Artistotle’s understanding of the body was based on a surface observation which is reflected in the importance he places on imitation of life – of reproducing the visible world.

It’s not until the latter part of the 20th century that we’re able to get ‘inside’ the body, particular with the development of scanning and photographic technology that has allowed for the study of living subjects. And parallel to this came a shift in perception of the biological body – the departure from the pre-industrial idea of the body as one intrinsically linked to the natural world to one that bears attributes of a synthetic world: this is the realisation of the post-human idea. In a previous article here on London Theatre Blog, I touched on the work of Australian performance artist Stelarc. Stelarc’s work is in some ways the representation of the post-human idea, in which the body’s interaction with its environment bypasses technological interfaces to become fully integrated with that technology. Whether Stelarc is actually able to achieve this shift in being is debatable, at the very least he provides a compelling representation of the condition with performance pieces such as third hand, virtual arm, and virtual body.

Outside of the performance realm, the marriage of the synthetic and the biological has been the object of study by scientists working in the field of nanobiotechnology. In a fascinating paper, published on Salon.com, prof. Alan Goldstein, explains how the old idea of the cyborg, one of an imposed fusion of synthetic and biological, is already defunct in the face of new nanobiobot technology – a true hybrid artificial life form that evolves and develops from the inside-out, rather than the outside-in:

“In order to understand the astonishing leap we are about to make, one needs to grasp that nanobiotechnology is more than just another tool. It is also a monumental experiment in molecular evolution over which we may ultimately have very little control. A nanobiotechnology device that is smart enough to circulate through the body hunting viruses or cancer cells is, by definition, smart enough to exchange information with that human body. This means, under the right conditions, the “device” could evolve beyond its original function.” (Goldstein in I, Nanobot, Salon.com, 2006/03/09)

If indeed our biological make-up does change at a sub-atomic level, and mutations do occur but they are not visible on the surface then chances are that it will not affect the actor or theatre in general, because the theatre is based on spectacle, the act of seeing, on external senses. This prompts me to think that the theatre as a ‘mirror up to nature’ in Hamlet’s words, is more of a smoke screen that falls short of seeing the bigger picture. The question is, do we really need to ’see’ or are we content with the illusion of seeing? I’ll end this one with a poem:

In this house of skin and bone,
frame supporting silky chasm,
I slip into the black abyss — where
organs spin like jellyfish,
and heartbeats pound on goatskin drums,
where spleen and lung dance as one –
but in the dark, deep inside, who am I
but a guest it seems, the guest of me.

An example of a recent fictional representation of the cyborg is the lead character in Mamoru Oshii’s 2004 animation film ‘Innocence: Ghost in the Shell 2’. The story revolves around the cyborg detective Batou as he tries to unravel the reasons behind a murderous robot revolt in the year 2032. The storyline is similar to that of the famous 1950 science fiction novel, iRobot by Issac Asimov, though Asimov kept the cyborg or the union of machine and human organism in the background. Innocence questions the relationship between man and machine and speculates on a society where the position of the machine has been elevated to human equal and has become the much represented 1980’s disaster scenario of the dominant, malevolant, dictator machine.

Mamoru Ishii's Ghost in the Shell 2 - Innocence. 2004

Though there is a clear distinction to be made between cyborg (cybernetic organism, part machine, part human) and humanoid robot (fully automated mechanical robot designed in human form), most fictional representations blur the distinction and posit the cyborg and humanoid robot as the ‘other’, and thus suppress both forms to a lower rank. Taming the machine was partly the subject of Asimov’s three laws of robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second law.

This is a long-standing view that can be traced back to at least mid-17th century Cartesian thought with Descartes argument in Meditations that he considered animals to be simply machines or automata; and that hat kept human beings above the level of automata was an ‘immaterial soul’. Almost a century later in 1748 and the French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de la Mettrie wrote a book called Man a Machine in which he declared that man was no different to any other automata. This early materialist view caused him to flee to Holland in retreat from persecution by the Roman Catholic church.

According to Bruce Mazlish in his essay ‘The man-machine and artificial intelligence’ the notion of automata during the enlightenment period was equivocal in the sense that it provoked fear but also the promise of creative ‘Promethean’ force. The tension between these two aspects of the automaton at play is best illustrated in Mary Shelly’s novel Frankenstein. Later on I’ll move on to a brief discussion of Donna Haraway’s influence on the contemporary academic understanding of the cyborg, but suffice to point out here that both Shelley’s monster and Haraway’s cyborg are products of technology and science, and of culture and social reality; they both transgress and put into question the idea of eugenics in terms of body measurements and classifications, and they raise issues of gender and reproduction.

Cyborg as human enhancement

The term ‘cyborg’ was created by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in a paper submitted to NASA in 1960 titled “Drugs, Space and Cybernetics’ in which they referred to their conception of an enhanced human being who could survive in extraterrestrial environments. Their concept was the outcome of thinking about the need for an intimate relationship between human and machine as the new frontier of space exploration was racing ahead, fuelled by US and Soviet Cold War political rivalry.

In the essay, Clynes and Kine wrote: “The task of adapting man’s body to any environment he may choose will be made easier by increased knowledge of homeostatic functioning, the cybernetic aspects of which are just beginning to be understood and investigated. In the past, evolution brought about the altering of bodily functions to suit different environments. Starting as of now, it will be possible to achieve this to some degree without alteration of heredity by suitable biochemical, physiological, and electronic modifications of man’s existing modus vivendi…” The degree to which body alteration and enhancement has progressed since the 1960’s is perhaps best illustrated through recent applications of body enhancement such as the example of Matthew Nagle. From complete paralysis of his limbs, Nagle was able to “open e-mail, play a computer game, and pinch a prosthetic hand’s fingers” thanks to a sensor implanted in Nagle’s brain.

Claudia Mitchell, first US resident to receive a bionic arm.

The application of physiological modifications does not stop at life-enhancements for people with severe limb disabilities, it extends to the ethically questionable field of military strategy and advanced weapon systems. In order for the body to remain integral to militray operation it must adapt accordingly with vanguard technology. A similar argument could be made for all human beings living in increasingly technological environments, where the technology often surpasses human ability in terms of speed, transmission, communication, movement, memory etc. This is the territory of performance artist and researcher Stelarc.

Cyborg as military enhancement

In a book called Cyborg Worlds, published in 1989, Chris Hables Gray wrote a chapter titled ‘The Cyborg Soldier: the US military and the post-modern warrior’, in which he argued that the soldier is “(re)constructed and (re)programmed to fit integrally into weapon systems. The basic currency of war, the human body, is the site of these modifications, whether it is the ‘wetware’ (the mind and hormones), the ‘software’ (habits, skills, disciplines) or the ‘hardware’ (the physical body). To overcome the limitations of yesterday’s soldier, as well as the limitations of automation as such, the military is moving towards a more subtle man/machine integration: a cybernetic organism (‘cyborg’) model of the soldier, that combines machine-like endurance with a redefined human intellect to the overall weapons system.”

In her 1991 Cyborg Manifesto Donna Haraway refers to modern war as a “cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984’s US defence budget.”

Echoing this today, in 2006 on the US army website you can read about ‘FCS’ or Future Combat Systems which is the immersion of the “soldier in an environment that is fully aware and fully integrated in an interactive computerized network system in which information is being relayed instantaneously. The soldier does not co-exist with the technology but becomes part of that technology itself, an integrated unit of action alongside war machinery, robotic devices and other military equipment.”

BigDog US military combat robot.

“FCS is about the 21st Century Soldier. Lessons learned in Operation Iraqi Freedom and the Global War on Terrorism have shown that a joint, combined arms, network centric force has the ability to both rapidly defeat an enemy in battle and act as a key element in follow-on peacekeeping efforts. The core of the FCS-equipped UA – is a highly integrated structure of 18 manned and unmanned air and ground maneuver sustainment systems, bound together by a distributed network and supporting the soldier, acting as a unified combat force in the Joint environment. The network uses a Battle Command architecture that integrates networked communications, network operations, sensors, battle command system, training, and MUM reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities to enable situational understanding and operations at a level of synchronization not achievable in current network centric operations.” (BG(P) Charles A. Cartwright and Dennis A. Muilenburg)

Cyborg as metaphor

Donna Haraway is one of the leading academic thinkers in the field of the ‘posthuman body‘, she is a professor of feminist theory and technoscience at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. In 1991, in her seminal work Simians, Cyborgs, and Women she wrote the Cyborg Manifesto, subtitled ‘Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’. In the manifesto, she uses the image of the cyborg as a metaphor of high-tech culture that breaks the old dualisms of Western thinking like the Cartesian division of mind and body, or the notion of the Self and the Other, male and female, reality and appearance, and truth and illusion.

These are notions that Stelarc breaks down through his performance practice, though arguably the dichotomy of male and female is still upheld with stelarc’s exploration of the cyborg through his constant reference to ‘the body’ which is his body in performance, often completely naked revealing his male genitalia, and thus ‘the body’ becomes a male construct in Stelarc’s world.

Haraway argues that we are no longer able to think of ourselves in these dualisms and she pushes the argument further by saying that we no longer able to think of ourselves as biological entities. Instead, we have become ‘cyborgs’ which she defines as “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”.

Cyborg as performance – Stelarc

Stelarc is an Australian-based artist, currently doing research at Brunel University in the UK. He has been doing performances since 1968 and has performed extensively in Japan, Europe and the USA at events related to new music, dance festivals and experimental theatre. In his performances he has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality systems and the Internet to explore what he calls “alternate, intimate and involuntary interfaces with the body”. Some examples of this are his performance with a third hand, a virtual arm, a virtual body and a stomach sculpture. He has acoustically and visually probed the body- having amplified brainwaves, blood-flow and muscle signals and filmed the inside of his lungs, stomach and colon, approximately two metres of internal space. He has done twenty-five body suspensions with metal shark hook insertions into the skin, in different positions and varying situations, including some in remote locations.

As I mentioned before when Stelarc talks about his body he refers to it as ‘the body’ by which he is referring to the “cerebral, phenomenological, aware, and operational entity immersed in the world…when this body speaks as I, it does so realizing that in the context of “I go to London” or “I make art”, the letter I designates only “this body goes to London”, “this body makes art.” It’s a huge metaphysical leap to imagine that I refers to an inner essence, self, or soul. (in Stelarc, The Monograph, chapter 7 “Animating bodies, mobilizing technologies”).

Evolution (Writing 1 word simultaneously with 3 hands) Maki Gallery, Tokyo 1982. Photo Keisuke Oki

The high suspensions, especially the one in Copenhagen from a crane, above the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen – 28th June, 1985, are a way of “experiencing the downforce of 1g gravitational pull”. The stomach sculpture also figures in the realm of the intimate, inner-body space.

Stelarc’s notion of the body is reminiscent of the idea that Artaud often referred to, “the body without organs”. In The stomach sculpture Stelarc says “The technology invades and functions within the body not as a prosthetic replacement, but as an aesthetic adornment. One no longer looks at art, nor performs as art, but contains art. The hollow body becomes a host, not for a self or a soul, but simply for a sculpture.”

The Body without organs is a chastised body. In his radio play of 1947, To Be Done with the Judgement of God, Antonin Artaud proposed a kind of “Dionysian castration”:

By placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his anatomy.
I say, to remake his anatomy.
Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally,
god,
and with god
his organs.
For you can tie me up if you wish,
but there is nothing more useless than an organ.
When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic
reactions and restored him to his true freedom.
Then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dance halls
and this wrong side out will be his real place.

(in Artaud, Selected Writings, pp 570 -571)

Stelarc’s view on the hollow body or the body without organs is that a hollow body would be a better host for all the technological components needed to put inside it. In past evolutionary development a change of locomotion could be argued as the significant event (shift to bipedal liberating hands as manipulators), future development would be prompted by a change that was only skin deep. This hollow body would be literally a body without organs a body that need not be organ-ized. (Stelarc in The Monograph)

Stretched Skin - Third Hand. Yokohama Art Gallery, Yokohama - 29 May, 1988. Photo by Simon Hunter

The other site for Stelarc’s body is one that attempts to be in a way ‘universal’, it is the body as ‘obsolete’. This is found in Stelarc’s virtual and prosthetic works such as the third hand, the virtual arm and the exoskeleton. All these performances, though localizing specific areas of research, all point towards the idea of the body as cyborg, and the human body as obsolete. According to John Appleby it is an attempt at showing his idea of a way forward to a post-human condition, a shift away from the standard evolutionary system and the way for leaving the solar system”. Though Appleby is skeptical towards Stelarc’s claim and argues that it is not as radical as it is may initially appear. The ideas “constitute a straight forwardly teleological narrative and, as such, partake of the humanist discourses arising out of the cartesian dualism that he claims to repudiate.” Appleby compares Stelarc’s ideas to the concept of cyborgian development first proposed by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline. (From Chapter 6 of the Cyborg Experiments)

One thing which strikes me as being clear from looking at Stelarc’s performances is that they cannot demonstrate in practical terms the obsolescence of the body, they can only suggest it. Stelarc’s body, no matter what condition it is put in is still subject to the same physionomical laws as everyone else. He relies on his organs to function and operates with a distinction of body and mind. But it is the possibility to rethink the ways in which our bodies interact with our environment, especially through interfaces such as the Internet, and how we receive and process information and use it to inform ourselves in space that is key to his work.