Post on 29-Mar-2023
ON TECHNE: PERFORMANCE AND THE HUMAN-CRAFTED ENVIRONMENT
Performance Research Vol. 10, No. 4 (December 2005)
THE REVELATION OF TECHNE: AN ANATOMICAL THEATRE
Final copy submitted by Gianna Bouchard (September 2005)
Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes
to presence in the realm where revealing and
unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth,
happens.
(Heidegger, 1978: 319)
In his 1954 essay, The Question Concerning Technology,
Heidegger introduces to understandings of technology a complex
set of relations between knowledge and truth, and economies of
vision and obfuscation. In his quest for the ‘essence’ of
technology, Heidegger adopts an etymological approach to the
problem by engaging with the Greek term technē, which was one
of three branches of knowledge defined by Aristotle, alongside
epistēmē and phronēsis. In their most basic formulations,
technē relates to skill and craft in the form of practical
knowledge; epistēmē relates to theoretical or scientific
knowledge; and phronēsis connotes a practical wisdom,
predicated on ethical values and comprehension. For Aristotle,
technē described a productive skill that involved a ‘reasoned
state of capacity to make’, where the emphasis was on the
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creator and ‘not in the thing made’ (Aristotle, 1984: 1800).
Such practical knowledge was very much allied with copying or
completing that which was already in existence in the natural
world. Technē, as a branch of knowledge, was invested with the
skill and understanding to create things through enabling them
to come into being and by making manifest articles and objects
from nature.
Through this etymological analysis, Heidegger focuses on
this aspect of technē that is concerned with ‘becoming’ or
‘bringing into being’: ‘Technē is the name not only for the
activities and skills of the craftsman but also for the arts
of the mind and the fine arts. Technē belongs to bringing-
forth, to poiēsis; it is something poetic’ (Heidegger, 1978:
318). Technē’s relation to epistēmē means that both are
embedded in ‘knowing’, through extended knowledge,
comprehension and the formation of the expert, which provides
‘an opening up’ and, as such, technē is a mode of revealing:
Technē…reveals whatever does not bring itself forth
and does not yet lie here before us…. What is
decisive in technē does not at all lie in making
and manipulating, nor in the using of means, but
rather in the revealing…. It is as revealing, and
not as manufacturing, that technē is a bringing-
forth (ibid: 318)
Aristotle’s approaches to understandings of knowledge are
inevitably caught up in discursive arguments about truth, which
is necessarily at the centre of these epistemological
paradigms, for appropriate and valued knowledge must surely be
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based on what is ‘true’ and valid. For the ancients, technē,
epistēmē and phronēsis were all about presencing as a mode of
truth through revelation and uncovering, which Heidegger then
engages with in relation to technology.
Medical science has long been invested in the visual
disclosure of what is normatively unseen in the body through
technological means, drawing upon a complex historical and
philosophical relation to the Aristotelian notion of technē.
This essay will interrogate Heidegger’s analysis of technē as a
mode of revelation and its impact on potential readings of the
body when such medico-technology is used in performance.
Heidegger’s suggestion that there is a constant tension between
this mode of revealing and a simultaneous obscuring of the
object will be considered in relation to a specific performance
moment in the work of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. The piece
incorporates the insertion of fibre optic technology into the
body of the actor and so draws attention to certain systems of
relation that usually goes unnoticed and unremarked in theatre
studies. The bringing to visibility so fundamental in medicine
in order to diagnose and treat pathologies is usurped to reveal
specific relations implicit to the theatre.
As we have noted, Heidegger’s understanding of the
technological is predicated on a visual economy and the various
tensions that exist with it and which have been manifest
throughout medical history. Prior to the Renaissance and the
emergence of Andreas Vesalius, medical training and practice
was segregated by Aristotle’s epistemological distinctions
between technē and epistēmē. As a practical skill and, what was
then considered to be, a form of manual labour, the surgeon’s
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domain was thought to reside within the remit of technē: ‘…a
gulf opened between doctors and surgeons, who were gradually
identified, the former as theoreticians (thus as clerks), the
latter as practitioners (thus as laymen)’ (Pouchelle, 1990:
21). The surgeon’s work was focused on external pathologies and
trauma that required incision, excision, phlebotomy and
amputation, from knowledge gained as an apprentice in the
field. Within the anatomy theatres of the time, it was the
surgeon who dissected the body, under the instruction and
guidance of the physician, in much the same way as medical
treatment and care was meted out. At the sickbed, the physician
would indulge in little contact with the patient’s body,
depending instead on his theoretical knowledge, or epistēmē,
for his diagnostic acumen. Surgeons and apothecaries would then
carry out doctor’s orders and prescriptions. It was this direct
and defiling contact with the body and its fluids that partly
influenced the lowly status of the surgeon, contaminated as he
was by the body’s corruption and excesses.
Dissection, then, was literally in the hands of the
surgeon, who wielded the knife and incised the body
efficiently by reason of his practical experience accrued in
the field. In the incisive act was the potential to
demonstrate anatomical knowledge as true by revealing, through
technē, explicit assertions about the body. This possibility,
however, was confounded by a quite different conception of
knowledge from that espoused by Heidegger, and representative
of modern understandings, which could not identify with the
cadaver as a phenomenal entity, capable of delivering its own
truths. The technology of dissection was only suited to
display the body at this pre-modern stage: it could not
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produce demonstrable, true knowledge because that only existed
in textual form, outside of the body itself and the work of
the dissector. The book was considered to be the repository of
intellectual truth about the body and occupied a position of
prominence in the pre-sixteenth century anatomy theatre.
Textual knowledge was valued above all else in the
medical faculty, as early modern medicine engaged with the
tenets of humanism, which were founded on a renewed interest
in Greek and Roman texts, ideas and values. Teaching centred
on reading and debating these texts, with assessment of
knowledge acquisition based on a student’s ability to
regurgitate by rote staple answers from them. Looking inside
the body and any form of dissection within this text-based
frame became a means of consolidating this process of
memorisation through visual cues and representations. To see
corporeal structures and observe physiological functions in
the body served as part components of memory architecture,
arguably more effective than two-dimensional diagrammatic
artist impressions. It was simply a didactic tool, rather than
an interrogative or analytical procedure, assuming as it did,
that the ‘truth’ of the body had already been revealed and
articulated in written form by the ancients. With apparently
truthful knowledge situated in the text, the surgeon, or
sector, at the dissection only had to display the relevant
anatomical parts to substantiate and demonstrate the text. In
other words, revelation was of the veracity of the text,
rather than the body, which became a peculiarly passive object
on the anatomy table, capable only of upholding words rather
than demonstrating them. Heidegger’s relation of truth and the
visibility of knowledge through demonstration is here
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unhinged, in a model of epistemology that elects the revealed
as of secondary importance to the text, adept only at
verifying knowledge already amassed and which certainly has no
place in challenging or subverting those findings.
Medical humanism and its concentration on textual
authority displaced the potential for the revelation of truth
in dissective practice by separating the practical skill
inherent in technē from the Heideggerian notion of an exponent
visual economy existing within its parameters. Arguably,
medical humanism made its practitioners and followers ‘blind’
in some senses to various sights, or, at the least, unwilling
to look afresh or even again at textual claims. The anomalous
and the incongruous were not acknowledged and practices, such
as dissection, were far from revelatory or exploratory, rather
they reinforced and underpinned textual ideologies. To enable
the technology of dissection to become capable of unveiling
knowledge there needed to be a paradigmatic shift in thinking
about the body and the source of authoritative and legitimate
knowledge about it.
The body needed to be conceived of as a unique
occurrence, distinct from the ancient texts, to be experienced
and interrogated by the anatomist, rather than merely
displayed by the surgeon. Jonathan Sawday locates this shift
of relation and understanding within the period of the
Renaissance, when the body itself became identified as the
‘liber corporum – the book of the body written by God’
(Sawday, 1995: 135). At this historical moment, technē was
given the potential to bring forth truth about the body as the
physician-anatomist was charged with uncovering the secret
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marvels of God’s handiwork and architectural genius inside the
human frame:
knowledge itself…was at a point of metamorphosis: …
the anatomist who searched in the body for its
structure rather than in the texts of ancient
authority…was the concrete representative of a new
conception of knowledge, one that professed to rely
on the experience of phenomena (ibid: 64)
Andreas Vesalius and his contemporaries in the sixteenth
century began to invert the humanist epistemological model by
re-engaging with questions of truth and visibility. They
advocated anatomical dissection not only as a key didactic
tool within medicine but also as a means of gathering
‘empirical verification of that anatomical knowledge that had
been passed down from older writings; dissection was the only
possible guide to the trustworthy description of the parts of
the human body’ (Carlino, 1999: 1).
Aristotle’s two key understandings of knowledge, technē
and epistēmē, began to be integrated within medical practice
and training. With medicine now acknowledged as a manual art,
the physician was expected to literally use his hands in the
pursuit of diagnoses, cures and interrogation that could
involve such work as the tactile examination of patients, the
preparation of medicaments or dissection. Epistēmē was
described by Aristotle as theoretical and scientific
knowledge, “capable of being taught, and its object of being
learned” (Aristotle, 1984: 1799). Such knowledge is
transmittable as educative material through its being provable
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and therefore demonstrable to others. The new figure of the
physician-anatomist undertook his own dissections,
demonstrating and analysing the body through a combination of
technē and epistēmē, now considered equally valuable to the
medic when practising the art of healing. His articulations
over the body emerged not from textual readings but from his
own practice in the moment of anatomising. With the body
conceived of as a text in its own right, to be read and
interpreted, the technology of dissection could begin to
unconceal truth and construct demonstrable knowledge in the
anatomy theatre.
Heidegger’s exploration of technology emerged from his
own contemporary context and moment in the middle of the
twentieth century when technology was rapidly changing and
evolving to become a dominant paradigm. He viewed it as a
powerful and worrying phenomenon that already had the
potential to manipulate and control through ordering of lives
and environments by technological means. His return to the
Greek origins and meanings of certain terms seems to address a
particular nostalgia for what he appears to conceive of as
‘purer’ engagements with technology that materialised through
mutual encounters with the physical world. Technē was
respectful of the natural environment and its orders /
disorders, whereas modern technology, for Heidegger, forces
nature to bring forth its treasures, energies and surpluses in
a manner that is both violent and exploitative. This is in
contradistinction to poiēsis, where things naturally come
forth, such as blossom or the opening of a flower’s petals:
‘The revealing that rules in modern technology is a
challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand…’
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(Heidegger, 1978: 320). He refers to the soil which is
challenged and forced to bring forth its stores of coal and
ore, for instance, and the river that is dammed in order to
generate electricity.
Following Foucault, medical technologies can be viewed as
forcing the body to relinquish its interior secrets, often
violating its vulnerable exterior to access the inner
organism. Heidegger’s proposition of a challenge to nature
through technology sometimes becomes a moment of unwatchable
violation, when the body is entered and viewed by instruments
and machines. The moment of challenging the flesh by the
scalpel, cleaving it in two, is the point at which dignity,
integrity and sacredness are directly detached from the body.
Once again, the tension that Heidegger locates in the movement
of revelation and concealment is identifiable in this act of
opening and intervention. The incision and its subsequent
separations and partitions will eventually conceal the
originary unity of the body as it is fragmented and
dismembered but what will be revealed through this brutal
partitioning is new knowledge and understanding of that
holistic figure.
The technological artefact or tool is commonly perceived
as extending the human body, particularly the senses, by
radically enhancing certain aspects of the body, making them
more efficient or powerful. For instance, the microscope
extends vision by magnifying its objects, and the spade
utilises our dexterity and strength but channels them in very
specific ways so that digging is effective and productive.
Inevitably, the tool demands some skill in its proficient use
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or it will not operate at its most efficient level.
Heidegger’s philosophy of technology moves beyond this
apparently simple comprehension of the tool as an extension of
the human, to consider its essence as a mode of revelation
and, at times, exploitation. The extension granted through
technology is between self and environment; the self that
wields the tool and the object it contacts and manipulates
beyond itself. In other words, the tool performs ‘primary
relationships between external things’ by connecting them in
some way – physically, visibly and so on (Rothenberg, 1993:
11). As an ‘instrument of relations’, technology links that
which is useful, productive and beneficial to human needs and
ends (ibid: 11). In medicine, relationality through the
scalpel or other surgical instrument is between interior and
exterior, living and dead flesh, knowledge and ignorance that
constantly play between visibility and concealment. Technology
connects these elements in the anatomical scene by making such
relations visible or, at the least, by bringing these states
into contact with one another.
Theatrically, relationality occurs in multiple ways, as
semiotic analysis can reveal through consideration of such
elements as indexes and icons but what about technology making
manifest certain relations previously unseen within the
theatrical frame? Theatrical technologies, such as lighting
and sound are, of course, capable of undertaking this task but
more interestingly, I want to interrogate the potentials of
utilising certain medical technologies in performance and the
connections between philosophies of technology and these
moments on stage and to do this I am going to examine a
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particular scene in Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s production of
Giulio Cesare (2001).
Here, medico-technology is used to reveal specific
relations crucial both to the theatre and foundational to
Shakespeare’s text of Julius Caesar, which the performance is
based upon. In a particular scene in the first act, the stage
is taken to blackout and the actor, labelled as ‘KS’ on his
flowing white robe, sits downstage right with a box-like
object in front of him on the floor. The character’s name is
“…VSKIJ” and he appears to be a conflation of Konstantin
Stanislavski and Christ. This doubleness is implied through
his Christ-like appearance and Stanislavski’s initials on his
robe. In the blackout, the only light comes from an initially
indiscernible source that the actor holds in his lap. It casts
gentle shadows over the actor’s body and as he speaks he
slowly lifts the light towards his face. He then shines it
directly into his mouth, so that this round cavity radiates
light before the illumination wavers and gradually disappears
from view, the source travelling further back into the actor’s
throat. As the light fades, so a disc of light and movement
appears on the back wall of the stage. It becomes apparent
that this disc of light is in fact the projection of a film of
a journey through a dark, moist and initially unrecognisable
tunnel whose sides are strangely animate and even violent,
pushing against the camera, blocking its way and then allowing
passage once more. At some point in this sequence, the
spectator suddenly comprehends the relations here and can
retrospectively unravel what has been seen. The light is the
tip of a length of fibre optic cable which the actor has fed
into his body, at which point the live relay of the optic’s
images are projected onto the cyclorama. What we have, for a
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time unwittingly, witnessed is the journey of the cable down
the actor’s trachea to a position in front of the vocal cords
in the larynx.
Using this medical imaging technology, the audience sees
the vocal cords of the actor, who is now almost completely
invisible on the stage with only limited light spill from the
fibre optic inside his body. As he speaks, the work of the
vocal cords is revealed, operating through different
intensities of muscular contraction that are sometimes gentle
and sometimes wild. What technology makes manifest here is the
relation between physiological activity in the larynx that is
violent and extreme, the creation of sound through these
muscular actions and its transformation into speech by the
mouth, tongue, teeth and lips. In a play where speech is key
to the narrative in terms of manipulating and persuading
listeners, not only is the rhetorical work of language
demonstrated in the actorly delivery of speech but technology
is used to show the work of the body of the speaker in this
process. The relation between the actor’s body and the
dramatic text, so prevalent a concern in theatre studies
discourse, is here focused and magnified through technology
that makes the connection explicitly physical, embodied and
visible.
To put objects and materials into relational dynamics
with each other in this way through technology is symptomatic
of an intention or a will to do so. The tool, the instrument
and the device must be controlled and directed towards its
objects by the human operative that implies ‘an idea to act, a
thought that engages with the world, making the possible
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actual’ (ibid: 14). Much philosophy of technology is concerned
with this intentional movement outwards from the body and into
the world through the mediation of the tool. This, I believe,
explains the slight unease I felt at witnessing the actor
inserting and manipulating the fibre optic cable in Giulio
Cesare. The technological artefact moves outwards from the
body but then doubles back on itself to invade its own origin,
if you will. Tools wielded by an individual on his or her own
body confounds this outward movement and becomes unnerving,
even disturbing, in its self-direction. Technologies of
medicine are largely invested in such penetrations and
interventions in the human body that are socially acceptable
when directed by a medical professional but considered as
something radically other when used by an individual on their
own body.
Heidegger claimed modern technology is rooted in
intentionality that becomes exploitative and destructive of
nature in the way that it is capable of forcing the world to
bring forth its energies, raw materials and treasures. Such
intention is transformative, whether it is exploitative in
this way or benign, because technology reaches outward in an
‘exciting, swirling, thrilling continuum of activity’ that
engages with the world and is transformed by it (ibid: 11).
Arguably, it is not just the world that is transformed by its
contact with technology. Don Idhe speculates that the
experience of using technology is itself transformative and
complex, outlining his contention through the simple example
of writing with chalk on a blackboard. Firstly, what can be
felt in this action is the texture and substance of the
blackboard through the chalk at the point where chalk meets
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surface (Idhe, 1979: 7). This information is transmitted
through the chalk, where the chalk becomes secondary to
perception. Idhe suggests that this experience involves the
instrument being reduced in perception so that it is not
encountered ‘as either thematic or as an object’ in this
moment (ibid: 7). Instead, the technological artefact becomes
an extension of the self through having a ‘partial
transparency relation between myself and what is other’ (ibid:
8). What is felt is a transformed experience – it is not the
same as touching the flesh or the blackboard directly: ‘This
transformation contains the possibilities…of both a certain
extension and amplification of experience and of a reduction
and transformation of experience’ (ibid:10).
Idhe defines such relations as ‘embodiment relations’,
where technology has a partial transparency and becomes
incorporated into our experience of the world (ibid:8). He
goes on to elaborate still further by concentrating on the
dental probe used to examine teeth. Once again, he notes the
intention of the instrument is to feel the tooth, not the
tool, and so one experiences the ‘relative disappearance of
the probe as such…it withdraws’ (ibid:19). So, even as the
instrument extends our knowledge of the world, it is not fully
within perception. In this position of partial transparency,
the probe simultaneously amplifies features of the tooth
beyond that which would be available to direct tactile
contact. The minutiae of the surface of the tooth can be
experienced through the probe but such amplification is not
without its concomitant reduction of other features. For
instance, the dental probe cannot transfer information about
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temperature or moisture on the tooth’s surface which touch
could:
With every amplification, there is a simultaneous
and necessary reduction. And within this structure,
two effects may be noted: first, the amplification
tends to stand out, to be dramatic, while the
reduction tends to be overlooked… The second effect
is that the transformation alters… the ‘distance’ of
the phenomenon being experienced. The instrument
mediated entity is one which…appears with a
different perspective, its micro-features are
emphasized and this is part of the transformation
process itself (ibid: 21-22).
Such an analysis deepens aspects of Heidegger’s by examining
the means by which technology functions and locates some
intriguing tensions that incorporate his reveal-conceal
dichotomy within them.
Although the spectator of the fibre optic scene described
previously cannot know what the actor experiences of this
technology, its transformative potential in performance is
dramatic. For the viewer, the technology becomes similarly
transparent in its disappearance from the scene. Watching the
live images from within the actor’s throat, the actual
workings and implications of this device are rendered
irrelevant as the picture becomes fascinating and mesmeric.
That the cable is within the body of the actor, held there by
his own hand, where a free and unimpeded airway should be, is
only acknowledged peripherally. The focus is on the vocal
cords and their action, even to the extent that the actor
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himself begins to dissolve within perception. The larynx is
amplified as equally as the body, wherein this anatomical
structure is lodged, is reduced, to the point where the
projection stands in for the actor and his speech. As in
dissection, part is exchanged for whole and becomes the object
of interest, its power residing in its uncanniness as a
revealed feature, one that we may know about but have probably
never seen, especially not in its animate and vocal state.
Speech is thus transformed by this revelatory technology into
an embodied act, making visible what is interior, hidden and
unconscious. In Heidegger’s terms, the correspondence between
text, body and speech is strikingly displayed by knowledge
being explicitly demonstrated as truth in a phenomenological
arena resonant with the anatomy theatre.
Amplification is of the invisible into the highly visible
in this scene, with the fibre optic cable and live projection
magnifying the anatomy of the larynx to grand proportions that
an entire theatre audience can see clearly. The labour of
speech is likewise heightened and made dramatic by revealing
the work of the vocal cords, as they are brought into
proximity by muscles acting on the thyroid cartilages in
forcible contractions that seem to have a life of their own
because of their isolated appearance from the rest of the
body. This is indicative of the reduction process at work,
whereby the magnification reduces a sense of the body and any
controlling mechanism over these structures. Also reduced is
the rest of the speech process, which involves the mouth and
the face in articulating and expressing words.
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The transformative potential of technology is also
apparent in its transmutation of the theatrical scene and
meaning construction within it. As noted above, the actor and
the technology become transparent in this moment as the
technology establishes new relations and brings them forth
into visibility. Disembodied anatomical attributes stand in
for the actor whilst embodying the speech act that is at the
centre of the text. The interior of the body is made to convey
meaning and significance in a manner that highlights director
Romeo Castellucci’s concern with connections between
Stanislavski and the realist mode of acting that his system
sought to exemplify. Through this “…VSKIJ” character,
Castellucci undermines Stanislavski’s aims of unifying the
psychical and the physical by focusing entirely on the inner,
organic operations of the body. Stanislavski’s focus on
memory, imagination and emotional recall are denied embodiment
as the exterior of the actor’s body disappears from
perception. Where thought is supposedly made manifest on the
stage of Stanislavski, in speech, gesture, expression and
movement Castellucci presents us with organic, biological
‘life’ as the creator of meaning – the intricate and
unconscious physiological processes of being an animate and
discursive subject.
As we have noted, the technology of dissection can be
viewed as a double-edged sword, that provides understanding
but in the same incision partitions the body irretrievably and
mercilessly. Certain tools and instruments appear to be the
bearers of these horrors, imprinted with their potential to
violate the body and the damage they can inflict on
unprotected flesh. They are deeply resonant with the pain that
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recognises the transformative power of technology in negative
ways. A recent exhibition at the Science Museum, London,
bears witness to this technological phobia and comprehension
of its destructive transformative potential. Pain: Passion,
Compassion, Sensibility displayed various instruments of
torture alongside medical and dental implements, silently
acknowledging their comparable power to connect pain,
domination and truth1. What is revealed with these tools is the
interior, which is forced to emerge into the exterior in
brutal and potentially fatal ways and makes explicit Elaine
Scarry’s contention that ‘the weapon and the tool seem at
moments indistinguishable, for they may each reside in a
single physical object (…), and may be quickly transformed
back and forth, now into one, now into the other’ (Scarry,
1985: 173).
This is perhaps what Kira O’Reilly highlights in her most
recent piece Untitled Action for the Arches (NRLA, 2005). In
this work, the spectator gets to spend time alone with
O’Reilly in an intimate environment, where she then offers her
body to be cut by the spectator and marked. One is free to
incise her flesh whenever and wherever one pleases, but in
reality few people actually seem to take her up on the offer,
preferring instead to sit with O’Reilly and take pleasure from
this proximity to the performer. Whereas in her other
performance pieces, O’Reilly inflicts her own wounds or has a
‘technician’ undertake the task, the audience member is here
presented with the possibility of using technology themselves
to open O’Reilly’s passive body, revealing the slippage 1 Pain: Passion, Compassion, Sensibility – a Wellcome Trust exhibition at the Science Museum, London, UK, 12 February – 20 June 2004, curated by Javier Moscoso (www.wellcome.ac.uk /pain)
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between weapon and tool, that is dependent upon context and
intention. Technological exploitation is resisted by those who
choose not to intervene in this body and Heidegger’s notion of
‘bringing-forth’ is problematised by the desires of the
spectator who avoid harming O’Reilly.
In order to comprehend this relation a little further, it
is useful to consider the work of Michel de Certeau on the
‘Scriptural Economy’, where he argues for a direct relation
between the body and writing through the power of inscription
manifest in the law of social organisation: ‘There is no law
that is not inscribed on bodies. Every law has a hold on the
body […] From birth to mourning after death, law “takes hold
of” bodies in order to make them its text’ (de Certeau, 1984:
139). The connection here with the technological artefact is
through the presence of the pen, as a tool, that transforms
language into material, graphic signs. De Certeau traces a
historical desire to then ‘place the (social and/or
individual) body under the law of writing’ that means that
bodies are constantly ‘defined, delimited, and articulated by
what writes’ them (ibid: 139). This is not only a symbolic
activity, confined to books and paper but also suggests an
explicitly carnal relation between the law, tools and the
body, where certain tools have been developed in order to
write on the flesh, such as handcuffs, the whip and the
truncheon. He detects in these kinds of penal instruments a
certain stability of form and design through time, but which
remain forever capable of outlining ‘the movements of a
suspended justice and already mold the parts of the body that
are to be branded but are still absent’ (ibid: 141). From
ancient torture instruments, to contemporary versions, it is
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possible to always identify the ways the body will be
‘written’ upon by these implements of social law.
Connections between the law and this kind of direct
inscription on the body of its rules and obligations are writ
large in the anatomical theatre of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries discussed here, as dissection was part of a system
of penal punishment for the most heinous crimes. Acquisition
of the body by the anatomists was a highly organised and
regulated procedure that involved academic, civic and
religious authorities working cooperatively. The whole process
of capital punishment was circumscribed by the law and the
dissection was an act that continued any punishment beyond
death, marking the body ignominiously and irrecoverably. The
instruments and technologies involved in this penal procedure
are themselves somewhat transformed and problematised by two
conflicting paradigms operating on the criminal body. De
Certeau elaborates a relation between the law and the
inscription of its parameters on the body in judicial
circumstances that then become heightened but simultaneously
altered by the scene of dissection. The instruments play
between weapons and tools, as Scarry suggests, as the
punishment is said to continue but the body becomes the site
of explicit knowledge. Technological revelation is twofold –
it reveals the utter destruction of the cadaver as the
ultimate carnal punishment and the demonstration of the
corporeal interior for didactic purposes.
I would want to suggest, finally, that the tool is
capable of more than this mediation between the law and the
body, and that the potential of transformation in its
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function, through techne, is resonant with theatrical
questions of illusion and, perhaps, animation. Animation
involves the giving of life to something or making it appear
vital and spirited. In the anatomy theatre, the demonstration
persuades its audience through animating various parts of the
body in a pretence of life – limbs, ligaments, muscles and so
on, are manipulated by the anatomist to show their living
operations and physiognomic linkages. Arguably, this situation
is replicated in the realist theatrical space where objects,
texts and bodies are revitalised in order to create an
illusion of reality and suspend disbelief in the spectator.
‘Truth’ in both events is a constructed reality that depends
upon certain tropes and devices that incorporate technology in
their manipulations. Following Heidegger, these technologies
can amplify, extend, reveal and exploit bodies on stage and
the images created there, whilst simultaneously concealing,
reducing and obscuring others.
Culturally, there appears to be a developing fascination
with the medicalised revelation of the interior of the human
body. This includes a plethora of television programmes, both
fictional and documentary, and various exhibitions, such as
Spectacular Bodies at the Hayward Gallery, London, and the
internationally touring show, Bodyworlds, which presents
preserved, anatomised cadavers to the general public.
Simultaneously, projects that seek to cross disciplinary
boundaries between art and science, including theatre and
science, have been emerging. The most recent of these is the
Body States project, launched by the University of Warwick, which
seeks to establish research links between theatre and the
history of medicine. The so-called ‘Pilot Project’, held on 11
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June 2005, consisted of a number of performances by artists
who explicitly explore the medicalised body in their practice.
It is within the context of this work that this essay is
situated.
REFERENCES:
Aristotle (1984) ‘Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI’ in The Complete
Works of Aristotle:
Volume One, ed. J. Barnes, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press
Carlino, A. (1999) Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning,
trans. J. Tedeschi & A. C. Tedeschi, Chicago & London: University of
Chicago Press
De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S.Rendall, Berkeley,
Los Angeles & London: University of California Press
Heidegger, M. (1978) ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in Basic Writings:
Martin Heidegger, ed. D. Farrell Krell, London: Routledge
Idhe, D. (1979) Technics and Praxis, Dordrecht & London: D.
Reidel Publishing Company
Pouchelle, M. C. (1990) The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, trans. R. Morris,
Cambridge: Polity Press
Rothenberg, D. (1993) Hand’s End: Technology and the Limits ofNature, Berkeley:
University of California Press
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Sawday. J. (1995) The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in
Renaissance Culture, London: Routledge
Scarry, E. (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking ofthe World, New
York & Oxford: Oxford University Press
Biography
Gianna Bouchard is Senior Lecturer in Drama at APU, Cambridge.
She has recently submitted her PhD for examination at
Roehampton University, titled “Performing the Anatomised
Body”.
Contact Details
Department of Music & Performing Arts
APU
East Road
Cambridge
CB1 3AL
01223 363271 (ext. 2016) or 07971 869109
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