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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