Relentless

The mind-body separation implied by this early cybernetic project was part of an age-old desire to leave ‘the meat’ behind and to connect to another, purer realm of existence– be it the Christian heaven or the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix. Hans Moravec, a robotics and artificial intelligence professor at Carnegie Mellon University, put forward the view of human identity as information pattern. Moravec even went so far as to suggest that human consciousness could be downloaded to a computer, or, putting it crudely, that machines could become human. However, as N. Katherine Hayles, who has studied the early history of cybernetics, explains, this desire to leave the body behind and move towards the state of existence as machine or information is nothing more than a fantasy. Hayles contests the cybernetic model of the world which is seen as mathematical in its essence, and in which 
bodily experience is only an illusion. In her critique of some of the verbal excesses of cybernetic theory, How We Became Posthuman (1999), she goes to great lengths to show that information always needs to be carried in a certain medium, or a certain body – be it silicon or, indeed, human flesh. What’s more, information actually depends on this medium 
in order to be enacted. This is another way of saying that cyborgs do need a body.

Perhaps cyborgs aren’t all that different and all that sinister after all. The Australian performance artist Stelarc encourages us to recognise our cybernetic heritage and identity when he says:
“We have a fear of the zombie and an anxiety of the cyborg, but really it’s a fear of what we’ve always been and what we have already become.” In his performances, Stelarc uses different forms of bodily extension: from external prostheses such as the Third Hand or Extended Arm, to internal ones, such as the Stomach Sculpture (a small titanium capsule exhibited within the artist’s stomach, rather than, as one might more typically expect, in an art gallery). Stelarc’s most recent project, The Extra Ear, involves having an ear implanted on his arm as a way of exploring what he terms “alternate bodily architectures”. The Extra Ear mimics the actual ear in shape and external structure but, rather than merely hearing, it will wirelessly transmit sounds to the Internet, making it a remote listening device. Needless to say, Stelarc’s work evokes a lot of controversy, both within the art world and in the media, not only because of its shock value but also because of what he says. Take his provocative statement that “the body is obsolete”. This is often interpreted as simply meaning that the body is unnecessary, that it is only an obstacle in our technological age. The French philosopher Paul Virilio even went so far as to accuse Stelarc of enacting a new version of Nazi-like eugenics in his art: a dangerous strategy aimed at improving the human through all sorts of robotic attachments. Is Stelarc really trying to tell us that the body has become unnecessary, that with the help of technology we can ultimately overcome it?

In 2002, I edited a book on his work called, appropriately enough, The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age. In an interview for the volume, Stelarc explained his understanding of the relationship between technology and the human as follows: “For me the body has always been a prosthetic body. Ever since we evolved as hominids and developed bipedal locomotion, two limbs became manipulators. We have become creatures that construct tools, artefacts and machines. We’ve always been augmented by our instruments, our technologies. Technology is what constructs our humanity; the trajectory of technology is what has propelled human developments. I’ve never seen the body as purely biological, so to consider technology as a kind of alien other that happens upon us at the end of the millennium is rather simplistic.” 
So clearly, Stelarc isn’t trying to construct some kind of evolutionary narrative of development – from the human of flesh and blood to some disembodied ‘post-human’. Indeed, we shouldn’t think that there was once a ‘pure’ body and that this has somehow been contaminated just as we entered the technological age. Instead, as Stelarc puts it, “We’ve been simultaneously zombies and cyborgs; we’ve never really had a mind of our own and we’ve never been purely biological entities.”

What is emerging from Stelarc’s art practice is a very different view of technology from the one that sees the human as ‘natural’ and technology as an external agent. This view challenges the instrumental 
understanding of technology proposed by the 
Greek philosopher Aristotle, a framework which still shapes the majority of our media stories about IT, the Internet or genetics. Within this instrumental framework, technology is seen as just a tool for the human. It is an external object that either promises us pleasure, if it’s a gadget such as an iPhone, or threatens our life and well being, if it’s a bomb. However, what I’m trying to do here is show you that it is possible to adopt a different model – one proposed not only by Stelarc but also by the American critic of technoscience Donna Haraway or the French philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler. All these people are very critical of the story of the human as a master of the universe who can become even more powerful via his technological gadgets. Instead, they outline a more systemic and networked model of human-nonhuman relations, in which prostheses are seen as intrinsic parts of the human body. In this view, technology is first of all an environment, or a network of forces and relations, rather than just an external prop.

From this critical-cybernetic perspective, the human
is seen as having always been technological. To put it differently, technology is precisely what makes us human. Even if we agree that the body is somewhat weakened or inadequate in a world of ubiquitous information flows, computer-led wars and nanotechnology, it doesn’t mean we have to bemoan the loss of our human potency, or desire to become Terminator-esque robots ourselves. We can better understand this position as a pragmatic recognition of our dependency on technical objects and other entities.

The work of techno-artists such as Stelarc, or techno-philosophers such as Stiegler and Haraway shouldn’t be reduced to a naïve prophecy of a post-flesh world in which man will eventually overcome his technological limitations. Instead, we’re better off seeing it as an exploration of the symbiotic relationship the human has always had with technology. In other words, it shows us technology as being an inseparable part of both ‘the human’ and ‘the body’.

Why is it important for us to think of ourselves in this way? Well, for starters, it allows for a better understanding of the relations and connections we have in the world. It also lets us develop a more interesting and more critical relationship to ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’. If we do accept that we have indeed always been cyborgs, it’ll be easier for us to let go of paranoid narratives which see technology as an external other that threatens the human, and that needs to be stopped at all cost before a new mutant species – of replicants, robots or aliens – emerges to compete with humans and eventually to win the battle. All this is not to say that in the universe of complex relations between human and nonhuman being ‘anything goes’, and that all connections are equally good. But seeing ourselves as always already connected, as being part of the system – rather than as kings of the universe to which all beings are inferior – is an important step in developing a more critical and a more responsible relationship to the environment, to what we call ‘man’, ‘nature’ and ‘technology’.

Photography courtesy of Stelarc

Words: Joanna Zylinska