[This is an Introduction to my edited collection: Joanna Zylinska (ed.) (2002) The Cyborg Experiments: the Extensions of the Body in the Media Age (Continuum: London and New York)]
Joanna Zylinska
Extending McLuhan into the New Media Age: an Introduction
[T]he need to understand the effects of the extensions of man becomes more urgent by the hour. (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man)
We should expect to be surprised… (Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio, Robosapiens)
When Marshall McLuhan was writing Understanding Media in the 1960s, he realised he was standing at the brink of a new age. After three thousand years of explosion ‘by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies’, the world, according to McLuhan, began to implode, bringing together, in hitherto unforeseen ways, multiple geographical locations, nations and identities. As a result of these transformations, people of different nationalities, races and cultures found themselves living in an ‘electrically concentrated’ village. Moving beyond the mechanical age in which their bodies had been extended in space, humans approached ‘the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our nerves and our senses by various media’ (McLuhan 11). While unable to decide whether the extension of consciousness he was predicting would be an unquestionably ‘good thing’, McLuhan nevertheless concluded that the world’s implosion left us with a deeper sense of responsibility for others ‘now involved in our lives … thanks to the electronic media’ (13). McLuhan’s aspiration for ‘wholeness, empathy … depth of awareness’ and ‘the ultimate harmony of all beings’ sounds idealistically old-fashioned. It has been discredited not only by later developments in global transnational economy, the strengthening of corporatism and the rise of anti-corporatist movements but also by the more sceptical discourses of postmodernism, postcolonialism and multiculturalism which have put in question the desirability, or even feasibility, of such harmony. And yet it is worth pointing out that his by now abandoned ‘global village’ was not entirely dissimilar from the urban spaces of the ‘new media age’. McLuhan’s global village was not as unified as it is sometimes presented today: it remained open to the contradictory forces of both globalisation and fragmentation which are now associated with the condition of postmodernity (see Harvey 240-259), a state of events which has led to the radical redefinition of our position in the world, our self-perception, sense of belonging, and identification with other species and life forms. This perception of technologies as ‘extensions of man’, of our ‘inner selves’ (see McLuhan 253), has allowed for a rethinking of the inner/outer distinction that was supposed to separate man from ‘his’ technologies. It is in its problematisation of the boundaries between the self and the world that McLuhan’s idea of the ‘extensions of man’ is particularly relevant for us.
Robotics is one area in which this process of ‘extending’ human identity by means of technology has been extremely prominent today. As Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio explain in their book Robosapiens, ‘Today’s robots are more than factory workers… Our mechanical destiny is not to be denied, and the questions arising from the creation of these creatures are ones that will shape the future of humanity, in whatever form it eventually assumes’ (19). For the last two decades, a number of high-tech companies, in Japan and the US particularly, have been committed to developing humanoid robots which can perfectly emulate not only human bodily functions (such as gait, sight and responsiveness) but also our appearance. What we are witnessing here is a process in which the human is extrapolated onto an external agent which is supposed to be both a replacement for ‘man’, and ‘his’ perfect simulation. But while most scientists are still struggling to produce ‘six degrees of freedom’ robots which can perform basic human functions - like standing straight or walking up the stairs while being able to avoid colliding with other objects - there is no doubt that experiments of this kind ‘shape the future of humanity’. By raising fundamental questions about the nature of the human (What would a humanoid robot be like? What functions would it need to perform? Could it dream of electric sheep?), these performances of McLuhanian ‘extensions’ contribute to the development of a new discourse of identity, one which goes beyond McLuhan’s own humanism.
This new discourse, described by Chris Hables Gray, Steven Mentor and Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera as ‘cyborgology’, focuses on the exploration of ‘intimate human-machine relationships’ (2). It recognises that the ‘extensions of man’ must be analysed not from a human point of view but from a position of inbetweenness, as the very process of ‘extending humanity’ undermines the inviolability of the boundaries of the human self and the nonhuman, machinic other. Rather than talk about the ‘extensions of man’, we are faced with a discourse which articulates the inherently prosthetic character of human identity. As Samuel Weber argues in Mass Mediauras, instead of telling the story of the individual Self we need to focus on its highly divisible Settings. He suggests that ‘the being of human beings has had more to do with setups and sets than with subjects and objects, unified in and through self-consciousness’ (4). This is to say, the identity of the human is always already relational; it has to be seen as remaining in relation with alterity (this relation can take the form of immersion, connectivity, or separation-as-difference). The discourse of ‘cybergology’ as developed by Gray et al. does not proclaim the story of the original purity of ‘man’ that was later polluted by technology. It is nevertheless historicised by its rootedness in the events and processes occurring in the information age and predominantly related to the development of new warfare techniques. As Timothy W. Luke writes, in the post-McLuhanian new media age,
[t]he boundaries dividing fact and fiction waffle and warp, a new lifeform - the cyborg - emerges, which is that hybridised organism that (con)fuses man and organism, animal and apparatus, physical matter and non-physical information. … However, we must recognise how the cyborg materialises, in part, out of things, but also, in part, out of us, creating a new order that makes ‘thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines’.1 (Luke 40)
The idea that these emergent life forms are absolutely novel is therefore problematic. Even though it responds to recent changes in the world economy and the production of information, the cyborg is created, as Luke has it, in part ‘out of us’, and thus points to the legacy of this new hybrid life with the man of McLuhan’s ‘media age’. What perhaps distinguishes the cyborgian discourse of identity from some of the earlier discourses of human destiny - be they religious, scientific or science-fictional - is the withdrawal of the possibility of knowing in advance what ‘the future of humanity’ will bring. The future of humanity, of the cyborg and of technology, has to remain open. Otherwise, as Jacques Derrida points out, we would be replacing the idea of the future with what he terms a ‘programmable tomorrow’ (387), a moment in time which we attempt to control by foreclosing it to the possibility of surprise, bewilderment and even horror. The fatalistic scenario which foregrounds only horror in its forecasts as to the future of human-machine interactions has therefore to be seen as reductive, as it is based on the maintenance of radical boundaries between the human self and the robotic other and, therefore, on a disavowal of the future. In such cases, the fear of technology, of change, of what the future might bring, is projected onto the robot, whose being is then amputated and presented as intrinsically other: not as part of the human, but rather as humanity’s competitor and enemy. This kind of identity extrapolation represents the foreclosure of a cyborgian future. The contrasting rhetoric of progression and rationalisation that has frequently been applied to describe the transformations effectuated by technology poses us with exactly the same problem. In his Introduction to The Critique of Pure Modernity David Kolb provides us with an example of how this logic of new technologies operates in post-industrial societies by arguing that ‘Technological production, bureaucratic administration, and other modernising factors bring about an economy that is efficient but also encourages the spread of an atomising and calculating style into other areas of our lives’(8). But the story of technology does not solely inscribe itself in the discourse of utilitarianism. It is always possible to tell a different narrative, foregrounding the working of an economy which is not based on direct gain, or on the equal balancing of investments and losses. This narrative is being developed today not only by netizens and cyber-artists but also by roboticists embarking on the seemingly impossible tasks of teaching their creations to smile, kick a ball or even dance.2
The impossibility of knowing the future in advance does not mean that we will not attempt to approach or even construct it. Cyborgology can thus be described as a performative discourse in an Austinian speech-act sense: it constitutes itself only through articulation and reiteration, participating in the constant redrawing of discursive boundaries. Rather than position a cyborgian future as the unknowable ‘other’ of the present, it blurs the boundary between the two by enacting and repeating the old in the new. Even if the future is to remain unpredictable and open, it will still provoke attempts to foresee, envision and perform it.
The Cyborg Experiments is one such attempt to perform the future. It consists of a series of experiments and interventions which attempt to trace current developments in science, technology and art. The essays included here highlight some of those instances in which technology is taken beyond atomisation and calculation, and enters into unprecedented couplings and unforeseen liaisons. Focusing on the work of two performance artists - the Australian artist Stelarc and the French artist Orlan - the essays go beyond the particularities of the work of Orlan and Stelarc to discuss wider issues regarding bodily extensions in cyberspace. By analysing some of the challenges technology poses to corporeality, The Cyborg Experiments also explores how humanism, and the idea of ‘the human’, have been brought into question by new developments in science, media and communications. Referring to Stelarc and Orlan’s reworking of the concepts of proximity, intimacy and distance, the essays analyse the interactions between human and machine and ask whether this opening of the sacrosanct space of the flesh can be seen as a ‘shift from the human to the post-human’.
One way in which The Cyborg Experiments attempts to deliver what its title promises is by staging an encounter between more traditionally ‘academic’ and ‘discipline-oriented’ essays and styles of writing, and those which can perhaps be seen as more experimental and cross-disciplinary. Such an arrangement is intended to both ‘mimic’ the hybridity of Orlan and Stelarc’s projects and initiate still further links and connections between different artists, theorists and approaches. The result, hopefully, is a complex and polyvocal debate, presented from a number of theoretical and critical perspectives, thus providing multiple interpretative possibilities of human-machine interactions in the ‘new’ media age.
The essays included in the book’s opening section, ‘The Cyborg Links’, investigate some of the connections between technology and its alleged ‘others’: nature, humankind and biological life. Focusing on liminal, borderline states of being such as human-machine, dead-undead and premodern-postmodern, the authors put in question the Aristotelian conception of technology that has dominated Western thought for almost three thousand years. In this view, technology is positioned only as a tool which is applied to nature, ‘an instrument … that happens to have been used well or badly’ (Clark 238). The horror narrative of technology which comes to life in today’s scare stories about genetically modified food, cloning or plastic surgeries is thus only the inverse of this conception, leading to a conclusion that ‘the instrument has taken control of its maker, the creation control of its creator (Frankenstein’s monster)’ (Clark 238). Mark Poster’s essay ‘High-Tech Frankenstein, or Heidegger Meets Stelarc’, which opens both this section and the volume as a whole, challenges precisely such an instrumental view of human-machine interaction. Revisiting Heidegger’s influential essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (1955), Poster argues that the focal point of Heidegger’s argument is modern humanity’s way of being, which consists of ‘bringing itself forth’ while simultaneously concealing this process (i.e. its ‘technology’). In this context, technology is understood as a way in which the world is set up, or brought forth, and not a mere object. However, Heidegger’s approach does not allow us to distinguish between different and constantly evolving technologies and technocultures; nor does it take into account the nature of postmodern technology-as-information processing, storage and dissemination. The ‘real’ question of technology today, as Poster argues, concerns the nature of the cyborg, or what he calls ‘the new order of humachines’, whose nature we can barely foresee. The question of how technology allows us to ask anew what it means to be human is developed further by Julie Clarke. In ‘The Human/Not Human in the Work of Orlan and Stelarc’ she explores the relationship between monstrosity, liminality and pollution in the work of these two artists. Interrogating the nature of the prefix ‘post’ in the term posthuman, Clarke discusses a number of other less bounded and more connected models of human identity. Meredith Jones and Zoë Sofoulis are in turn interested in temporal connections between contemporary body and carnal art as represented by Stelarc and Orlan, and the medieval bodily practices of the mystics who embraced suffering for the sake of holiness. They interpret Orlan and Stelarc’s work as staging ‘baroque modern’ forms of embodiment involving interchange between image and flesh, and thus opening themselves to the social world in ways similar to the rituals of mystics, visionaries and flagellants in the Middle Ages. Jones and Sofoulis argue that these two artists do not aim for a holy communion with the Church but rather for a secular embrace with technoscience. Stelarc’s pneumatic projects, which he describes in the final chapter of this section, provide an example of just such intimate embrace with technology. His most recent EXOSKELETON walking robot initiates a compliant coupling of human and robot in which ‘The robot would be more than an extension of the body. The body would be more than a brain for the machine…’.
Such bodily couplings are not inconsequential for our sense of identity and self-knowledge. Stelarc takes this conclusion further when, in an interview with Paolo Atzori and Kirk Woolford, he claims that ‘it’s only through radically redesigning the body that we will end up having significantly different thoughts and philosophies’ (non-pag., emphasis added). Section II of the book, ‘The Obsolete Body?’, explores some of the ways in which redesigning the body can change the way we think and philosophise. It also explores different possibilities of understanding Stelarc’s claim that the body has now ‘become obsolete’. In ‘What Does an Avatar Want?: Stelarc’s E-motions’ Edward Scheer analyses Stelarc’s work in the context of performance art. Posing the question, ‘What moves us?’, he investigates the parallel mechanisms that regulate physical and emotional processes in the human. Scheer dismisses claims that Stelarc’s performances are focused on the overcoming of the human body. Instead, he argues that, in Stelarc’s work, the body functions as an interface between technologies, delineating a prosthetic model of human identity in which agency is dispersed into the world. What emerges is a connected model of the human which opens a gap in our thinking between motion and e-motion, without supporting a radical mind/body split. Applying Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘rhizomatics’, John Appleby expresses his disappointment with what he sees as Stelarc’s straightforward teleological narrative of human evolution and optimisation manifested in his theory of bodily obsolescence. He argues that Stelarc’s pronouncements are not as radical as they are often presented, because they do not manage to escape the Cartesian dualisms which Stelarc claims to repudiate. And yet Appleby admits that, even if Stelarc’s performances do not necessarily point towards a ‘post-human condition’, they ‘do indeed create interesting possibilities for rethinking the way in which we interact with the world’. In my interview with Stelarc, conducted together with Gary Hall, the artist reveals his concern over certain dualistic readings of his work, which lead to the prioritisation of his performances (often described as interesting, creative or promising) over his writings (sometimes seen as banal, contradictory or problematic). Resorting instead to the image of prosthesis, which has defined his artistic project such as the Third Hand, Exoskeleton or Parasite, Stelarc describes his work as being situated in the liminal spaces between performance and writing, ‘between the actual and the virtual’, where the human is born out of the relationship with technology and where transformed environments necessitate the restructuring of the bodily design. Gary Hall’s ‘Para-Site’, intended as a ‘viral infection’ of Stelarc’s own official website, is itself an experiment devised to test the possibilities and limitations of new digital technologies. Through the use of hypertext links translated here into the paper medium, Hall ‘performs’ the idea of prosthesis as it is enacted in Stelarc’s performances and texts, not only ‘augmenting, extending, and modifying’ but also ‘invading, disturbing and contaminating’ the ‘original’ material. This allows him to investigate the forms of knowledge facilitated by technology as well as address the question of the ethics of reading, or interpreting, the projects actuated by it.
The ‘Self-hybridation’ section that follows focuses specifically on the work of Orlan. The essays included here explore some of the ways in which experiments in medicine and plastic surgery allow us to reconceptualise the notion of ‘embodiment’ and its relation to knowledge. In ‘Morlan’ Fred Botting and Scott Wilson argue that the processes of surgical (re)construction Orlan undertakes inscribe themselves in an economy of excess which can be associated with what Jean-Joseph Goux calls ‘postmodern capitalism’. Analysing the relationship between art and business, between artistic production and technological reproduction, they apply a Lacanian framework to trace the floating of lack and desire in post-industrial consumer societies. Here, Orlan’s parodic femininity becomes yet another item of capitalist expenditure. Orlan’s own piece is an attempt to question what she describes as a Manicheanism of our Western culture, which always makes us choose between two options. Explaining her artistic strategy as a refusal to be limited by such decisions, Orlan describes her projects as belonging to both nature and technology, the real and the virtual. Rachel Armstrong’s ‘Anger Art and Medicine’ provides an autobiographical reflection on her experience as Orlan’s assistant, helping her with the promotion of her operations in the UK. A medical doctor disappointed with the disintegration of the National Health Service, Armstrong confesses that the strength of Orlan’s ideas matched the strength of her anger against the medical profession and its unreasonable demands. Both bemused and repulsed by the commercialisation of medical care which ‘could be specifically customised to meet a single patient’s every need provided the funding was secured’, Armstrong’s solidarity with the artist wavers in the prospect of Orlan’s final operation, intended to create ‘the largest [nose] that could be possibly made for her face’.
The obsolescence of the body and a simultaneous reluctance to abandon it are thus two of the key problems explored throughout this collection. Significantly, a number of robots currently devised by Japanese and American technological institutes and laboratories are intended to be perfect simulations of the human. But it is not only external human features that are emulated in these experiments. One of Japan’s most respected roboticists, Shigeo Hirose, believes that ‘any robot engineered to be intelligent could be engineered to be moral. Robots could be saints. … We could build them to be unselfish, because they don’t have to fight for their biological existence’ (Menzel and D’Aluisio 19). However, what underlies these developments is a celebration of the human as both a physical and spiritual model (i.e. not only is the human body emulated to construct the most perfect robot, which could ‘pass’ as human, but also human(ist) morality is seen as a desirable ideal). But what remains unaddressed in these experiments is what a number of theorists of cyberspace, including Chris Hables Gray, author of the controversial ‘The Cyborg Bill of Rights’, call ‘the progressive cyborgisation of our society’. The question that we should ask is not how to teach robots to behave like humans but rather what forms of ethics and politics will emerge as a result of the transformation of humanity through its coupling with technology. Gray continues his reflection on ‘cyborg society’ in his article ‘In Defense of Prefigurative Art’ which opens the final section of the book, ‘Aesthetics and Ethics: Technological Perspectives’. He argues that the art of Orlan and Stelarc can be read as a direct attempt to shape, or prefigure, our cyborg future. Commenting on these two artists’ engagement with medical discourses and technologies, he concludes that their art not only delineates new aesthetic boundaries but also changes ethical and political norms regarding the ownership of our bodies and the wider societal practices that regulate them. Jay Prosser’s ‘Ph/autography and the Art of Life’ investigates the relationship between art and ethics as organised by technologies of representation such as photography and video. Interrogating a series of oppositions between reality and artifice, depth and surface, self and other, and participation and detachment, Prosser applies the Lacanian notion of the Real as ‘a thing of trauma’ to comment on a number of contemporary artistic practices intended to represent ‘real life’. By comparing the work of such artists as Orlan, Cindy Sherman, Del LaGrace Volcano and Nan Goldin with the video installations of the British artist Gillian Wearing, he traces the boundaries of what he describes as ‘ethical realism’. This section on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics as outlined by new technologies closes off with my article on ‘Prosthetics as Ethics’. Taking recourse to the concept of prosthesis - one of the ‘nodal points’ of this book - I look at different ways in which the self negotiates its relationships with alterity and exteriority. Prosthetics thus stands for me for an ethical way of thinking about identity and difference. Combining this newly emergent view of the human as always already ‘intrinsically other’, i.e. existing in relation to, and dependent on, its technology, with Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of respect for the alterity of the other, I explore ethical moments in the artistic practices of Stelarc and Orlan. Even though it is not necessarily through art that fixed identity can be challenged, I conclude by arguing that artistic practices of this kind foreground the broadly enacted performativity of identity, as well as preparing the grounds for the rethinking of identitarian relationships in our culture.
Notes
1 Luke’s passage incorporates a quote from Donna Haraway’s celebrated Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Haraway’s book, and especially her ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, which is included in it, famously inscribed the concept of the cyborg in a clearly articulated political discourse.
2 A nameless ‘robot with a female head’ developed by Hara-Kobayiashi Lab at the Science University of Tokyo is designed to ‘show emotion’, i.e. to articulate facial expressions which people will be able to recognise. The Honda robot, in turn, even though designed primarily for walking, can also kick a soccer ball or open a door. The achievements of DB, the Dynamic Brain robot developed by the Japanese research centre ATR, are not any less amazing: DB can both dance and juggle! (See Menzel and D’Aluisio 43-79)
Works Cited
Atzori, Paolo and Kirk Woolford. ‘Extended Body: Interview with Stelarc,’. CTheory, 6: September (1995), <http://www.ctheory.com/a29-extended_body.html>
Clark, Timothy. ‘Deconstruction and Technology.’ Deconstructions: a User’s Guide. Ed. Nicholas Royle. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2000. 238-257.
Derrida, Jacques. ‘Passages - from Traumatism to Promise.’ Points … Interviews, 1974-1994. Jacques Derrida. Ed. Elizabeth Weber. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, 372-395.
Gray, Chris Hables, Steven Mentor, and Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera. ‘Cybergology: Constructing the Knowledge of Cybernetic Organisms.’ The Cyborg Handbook. Chris Hables Gray, ed., New York and London: Routledge, 1995, 1-16.
Gray, Chris Hables. ‘The Ethics and Politics of Cyborg Embodiment: Citizenship as a Hypervalue.’ Cultural Values, 1:2 (1997): 252-258.
Harvey, David. ‘The Time and Space of the Enlightenment Project.’ The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Kolb, David. The Critique of Pure Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Luke, Timothy W. ‘Cyborg Enchantments: Commodity Fetishism and Human/Machine Interactions.’ Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics. 13:1 (2000): 39-62.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Abacus, 1974 (1964).
Menzel, Peter, Faith D’Aluisio. Robo Sapiens: Evolution of a New Species. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, 2000.
Weber, Samuel. Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media. Ed. Alan Cholodenko. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.