The Performing Subject in the Space of Technology

Through the Virtual, Towards the Real

M. Causey, E. Meehan, N. O'Dwyer, M. Causey, E. Meehan, N. O'Dwyer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137438164
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

This book reflects on the aftermath of shifts encountered in the maturing of digital culture in areas of critical theory and artistic practices, focusing on the awareness that contemporary subjectivity is one that dwells within both the virtual and the real.

Part I
Provocations: Subjectivity and Technology

Introduction to Part I

Matthew Causey, Emma Meehan and Néill O’Dwyer

In this first part of the book, we have attempted to create a specific theoretical trajectory by assembling a collection of essays that deal with major subjective concerns of art-makers and publics in digitally modernised technocracies. Entitled ‘Provocations: Subjectivity and Technology’, this section deals with – through the examination of challenging artworks and current affairs – a number of technologies that affect and contribute to altered subjectivities, including: genetic modification, digitalised memory, computer vision, virtuality and simulation, corporeal augmentation, an overabundance of data, mechanised automation, gaming and hypertexts.

This collection of chapters attempts to offer fresh ways of reflecting on the three-way relationship between aesthetics, ethics and politics, in an age where subjectivity and identity are becoming increasingly enmeshed in technologically propelled systems of production and mass intersubjectivity. Technologies – both hard and soft – as well as the processes that they expedite are evolving at a rapid pace. Whatever our understanding of technology, whether it be Heidegger’s claim that it is essential to human nature or Adorno’s (Marxian) view that it is linked to an ever-accelerating system of means-ends production, what is undeniable is that all discussions of it are, inevitably, accompanied with apprehension and excitement.

An epochal development in technology, generally, is the postwar period of the 1940/50s. These decades witnessed the reconditioning and deployment of computational systems – originally developed by the military for the purposes of telecommunication, remote-control and surveillance – into the public sphere, with the intention of regulating and ameliorating modernised societies. Technology, thus employed, was widely perceived as beneficent, facilitating economic growth and new ways of modernised life to flourish. But the maleficent aspects of over-rationalised societies had been reflected upon before, during and after this technological turn. Perhaps most relevant to this collection of chapters is Foucault’s influential work on disciplinary societies (1975/1977), and, further, his proposition of biopower (1976/1990). His theses offered new ways of comprehending the uses to which industrial technologies had been put in autocratic Western societies by proposing that modern nation states deploy a disciplinary psychology – ‘biopower’ – over their publics. His anology provides the panopticon prison as a paradigmatic metaphor for the new abilities of modern technocracies to exercise observation and normalisation mechanisms by embedding an awareness of permanent visibility in hierarchical institutes like schools, hospitals and factories. The outstanding characteristic of the surveillance procedures, now regulated and managed through political technologies, is their ability to operate on a mass cultural scale. In the wake of Foucault’s assertions, the concept was elaborated in the concluding years of twentieth-century philosophy by Deleuze in his Postscript on the Societies of Control (1992), which marks a shift from a disciplinary society towards a control society, where specious freedom mystifies the sinister reality of ‘diffused responsibility’, and where work permeates ‘free time’, which no longer exists outside structures of power. Giorgio Agamben’s even more contemporaneous writings analyse totalitarianism through the fundamental reduction of human life from its highest, political status (bios) to bare-life (zoe). This theoretical thread ultimately culminated in the inauguration of biopolitics. Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Sacred Human) project has led to an outpouring of biopolitical texts from authors such as Franco Berardi, Pietro Montani and Bernard Stiegler, to name but a few – many of whom are cited in the chapters of this section.

The fundamental subject of human life is provocatively called into question in Burcu Baykan’s opening discussion of ORLAN’s bioart performance, Harlequin Coat. Baykan provides a Deleuzian reading of the artist’s controversial performance that mobilised the sophisticated, yet ethically challenging, technologies of genetic engineering in order to grow fabrics from hybridised human and animal cell tissues. Rather than labouring the ethical aspects, which are always already present in any discussion of genetic technologies, Baykan’s text is one that focuses on the aesthetic, ontological and philosophical implications of ORLAN’s work. By framing Harlequin Coat as an innovative blueprint for examining the shifting nature of technologically affected human subjectivity, the chapter provides an optimistic counter-argument to the somewhat dystopian views that can often accompany technological discussions.

Biopolitics remains a strong thematic current in the two following chapters by Néill O’Dwyer and Sharon Phelan. Many cultural theorists support the view that, in modernised societies, all-seeing video surveillance technologies are a technological embodiment of Foucault’s panopticon metaphor by operating as a psychological pacifier of mass populations. Machine vision, the intrusive penetration of technology and the ongoing depreciation of privacy are primary concerns in O’Dwyer’s discussion of Obermaier’s Apparition (2004), using Bernard Stiegler’s techno-cultural critique. Stiegler advances the worrying notion that politics has become severed from the artistic domain resulting in a homogenised consumer society, overexposed to the spectacular and stripped of privacy. O’Dwyer discusses Apparition under the auspices of Stiegler’s appeal for a new avant-garde; that is, artists understood as reinventors of technologies and reconceivers of subjective circuits that could help reinvigorate sociopolitical discourse in digitally controlled regimes.

Phelan’s chapter also discusses biopolitics in a similar vein; however, whereas O’Dwyer discusses Apparition as an avant-gardist art event, Phelan discusses the work of an artist, Tony Conrad, who deliberately and directly critiques technocratic control regimes. Mobilising the biopolitical theories of Franco Berardi, Phelan suggests that Conrad’s experimental film The Flicker was very much a harbinger of a future that had yet to come into view, where the creativity of publics is harnessed, proletarianised and put to work under processes of capitalist production. Ultimately, Phelan argues that The Flicker opens up a space of ambiguity demonstrating at once biopolitical control and an exit strategy, with her deployment of William Burroughs’ idea that the virus always short-circuits total control. The chapters by Phelan and O’Dwyer offer a contrasting treatment of technicised subjectivity by drawing on two different theorists from the French and Italian philosophical canons respectively.

Matthew Causey’s chapter marks a slight shift in the analytical through line of this first section on performing subjectivities. While the chapter does very much remain in the sphere of politics, it is less concerned with the idea of regimes of control and more concerned about the lack of control. Although still evocative of Foucault’s panopticon metaphor, Causey’s chapter highlights the complacency of nation states in the aftermath of surrendering surveillance responsibilities to the mobile masses. He analyses the trauma suffered by individuals and communities in a digitised society of perpetual traces, and the mass circulation of personal imagery in the public domain. From instances of offending or defamatory photographs posted on social networks, to extreme examples of child pornography, Causey questions the politics of memory in a digitised culture complicit in the victimisation of vulnerable members of society, as a result of a mutated voyeurism – the mediatised gaze – through the provision of cloaked IPs and firewalls. Causey’s study interrogates the reality of living out lives in a world dominated by ineradicable and infinitely reproducible imagery, the perpetual circulation of images and the ethics of image creation. Performance is therefore considered within the frame of performativity; that is, the real-life implications of actions, the ethics of being in front of, or behind, the lens, knowing that the images are immediately duplicated in cloud servers and could circulate in perpetuity. Given that every technocratic citizen now has photo-videographic technologies ready to hand, Causey considers the implications of such a subjectivity on the public performances of individuals and groups.

Staying with the subjectivity of digitised memory (mnemotechnology), the proliferation of audiovisual traces and the technologies of documentation, Sarah Whatley’s chapter deals with the politics of why and how works are documented and disseminated, as well as what is discarded. Her chapter problematises the difficulty in capturing the spirit of the performance event, and thus attempting to remediate it through documentation processes. This is particularly the case for contemporary technological performances that involve an interaction between performer and a body-interface. It is furthermore true of performances that attempt to break down the audience–performer divide, as well as those that stimulate the visceral experience of the participant in making the work. Whatley’s consideration is centralised around her discussion of the material and the immaterial in digital culture, focusing on the work of Gibson and Martelli (previously Igloo) to interrogate these ideas. She not only addresses questions of how to accurately capture these events as a means of preserving our evolving cultural heritage, but so too does she highlight the need to engage aesthetics at the broader sociopolitical stratum, where culture is understood as an evolutionary process of new possibilities at the intersection of body and technology.

The dialectic of (im)materiality in digital culture is a thread of discussion that continues into the final chapter in this section, as taken up by Riku Roihankorpi. Under the auspices of psychological and sociological theory he reflects on the virtual as an other space of non-material intersubjectivity. He deals with notions of how evolved acts of expression, creation, communication and interpretation play out in virtual spaces of computerised simulation. In order to get to the bottom of the problem he offers a deeply nuanced philosophical reflection on the subject of mīmēsis, in which he frames virtuality and reality within the Levinasian binary of interiority and exteriority; that is, the opposition of I against the otherness of the world. He notes that the much-debated ‘identity politics of techno-medial communication is rooted not only in the questions of subjectivity, materiality and language, but also the mimetic processes that enable the various social and political functions of imitation and representation’ (p. 100, below). In order to tackle the problem aesthetically and historically, Roihankorpi examines Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty as an example of subjectivity made performative by a virtual performance of exteriority, which disguised an apocalyptic worldview. By revisiting the compelling gratuitousness characteristic of Artaud’s theatrical ‘irrationale’, Roihankorpi offers a rethinking of established views of mīmēsis and virtuality in the Western philosophical canon, thus challenging dominant paradigms of human representation. Central to his chapter is the view that virtuality is inseparable from reality; that is, virtuality is a technological subjectivity that manifests itself as a radicalised space of co-existence, agency, creativity and ethical authority, where we project ourselves to the exteriority of the world.

Crucially, central to this book is Roihankorpi’s assertion that the contemporary digital phenomenon of virtuality not only impacts upon subjectivity to a degree that it alters aesthetics, but so too does it influence, indeed mediate, the nature of who we are in a continuous dialogical process towards self-understanding. Performance practice and reflection have a key role to play in this discussion. Each contributor to this section demonstrates unique strategies for decoding how the spaces of technology and their specificities impact on how performance is made and received. The alteration of individual and collective subjectivity in the spaces of technology is accelerating as well as becoming more opaque, through layers of technocultural sedimentation. The authors in this section respond by asking how the re-examination of technologically engaged artistic situations can help clarify the subject’s position in broader sociohistoric totality.

References

Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press.

Deleuze, G. (1992) ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October, 59 (Winter), pp. 3–7.

Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books.

—— (1990) The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.

—— (1990) The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.

1

Into the Body of Another: Strange Couplings and Unnatural Alliances of Harlequin Coat

Burcu Baykan

This chapter examines Orlan’s Harlequin Coat, which is a multimedia bioart installation that has been carried out in collaboration with the Australian art and science collective SymbioticA. The French multimedia and performance artist Orlan, who is more readily recognisable for her surgery-performance series (1990–93) that radically altered her face and body, subsequently displayed Harlequin Coat at ‘Sk-interfaces’ at FACT (Liverpool 2008), curated by Jens Hauser. As controversial as her well-known operations, Orlan’s bioart continued her previous investigations of interfering with the integrity of the body in the spaces of technology, by using the carnal medium of skin cells. Employing the most advanced features of biotechnology, cultures of cells obtained by surgeries from the artist’s skin were mixed with different human races and species (Orlan 2008, 87).

My intent in this chapter is to address Orlan’s bioart installation and its engagement with the increasingly widespread convergence of biological and technological, human and non-human processes in contemporary art. Particular attention is paid to how different species are put into contact through biotechnological mea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• General Introduction: In the After-event of the Virtual: Matthew Causey, Emma Meehan and Néill O’Dwyer
• Part I Provocations: Subjectivity and Technology
• Part II Practices: Embodied Negotiations of Art and Technology
• Index