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Bodies that Speak Science Fiction: Stelarc—Performance Artist ‘Becoming Posthuman’
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- By Ross Farnell, Monash University
- Edited by Andy Sawyer, David Seed
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- Book:
- Speaking Science Fiction
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 04 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2000, pp 109-130
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- Chapter
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Summary
The rhetoric surrounding science fiction attempts to persuade us that cyberpunks are the ‘pragmatists and practitioners’ of the posthuman future; however, these fictional beings fade into phantasmagorical wish fulfilment when confronted by the reality of the performance artist Stelarc. Cyber-culture's contemporary focus on ‘becoming-cyborg’ has transformed this once marginalized ‘body artist’ into a cyber-star of cult status, embraced by the proponents of technoculture, from cyberpunk authors to theorists. But he's no cyborg-come-lately. For over three decades his art has materialized science fiction metaphor into posthuman being, ‘translating’ science fiction's textual and visual art, from Frankenstein to Terminator and beyond, into performative parameters. For many, performance artists such as Stelarc, Orlan, and Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) have come to represent the future of posthumanism. To others they are indicative of the apocalyptic dangers of a naïvely optimistic and untheorized approach to technology.
I propose that such performance art serves as a ‘mediation’ between science fiction, science, and cultural theory. A complex feedback loop of posthumanism can be traced from Artaud to performance artists, and then to theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari: from McLuhan to Virilio and Baudrillard, but also to Stelarc. The BwO, Stelarc's ‘hollow body’, Haraway's politicized cyborg, Prigogine's anagenesis and science fiction's fictional posthumans all intersect in a common language enmeshed in the paradigms and tropes of science fiction. Performance art attempts to offer pragmatic models for the body in future society, and possible strategies for either action, reaction, adaptation or resistance to the imperatives of information society and extra-terrestrial existence, all within a philosophy that approaches Gnosticism. Does it develop political, social and ethical strategies for survival in ‘late capitalism’, or is it just a symptom of the ‘society of the spectacle’, reducing (hyper)reality to art and image, engendering inertia and disempowerment through reductionist objectification?
Posthumanism needs to engage with a sphere of action that enables dialogue with bodies. This is provided by those performance artists who embody alterity: inscribed bodies that ‘speak’ science fiction. Their corporeal actualization of posthumanism generates an alternative discourse which constructs paradigms of difference from ‘traditional’ science fiction texts. By placing the performance events of Stelarc into the context of posthuman ‘texts’, I aim to illustrate aspects of posthumanism hitherto elided by the more conventional extrapolations of Otherness, such as the dominant cyborg imagery of contemporary science fiction film.