The End of the Transgressive Body

Interview with Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

• If we consider modern project as the last common social and artistic norm, then women’s body, being always postmodern, has been avoiding, "by norm", any normative discourse and placement. Is it possible today to determine the fate of the body, be it male, female, homo or heterosexual, in terms of transgression, sexual or social normativity, when we are witnessing every day (as you also try to envision in parenthesis) transgressive mind melting with the mainstream or former "deviations" to be considered perfectly normal? Doesn’t the main character from the very recent movie Transamerica announce the definitive end of the transgressive body, be it male or female?

— The end of the transgressive body? Definitely. The act of bodily transgression has been appropriated now by power, first as the prohibition necessary to confirm its ineluctability, but also as the dangerous exclusion the presence of which lends seduction to a rhetoric of power which is always threatened with a fatal loss of energy by mass disinterest in its games. Consequently, whether as the prohibition which confirms or the forbidden charm which reanimates the fatal boredom at the centre of power, the transgressive body is the resurgent cynical sign of a power which is dying of its own cynicism. Which can only mean that what’s dangerous today are not bodies staged under the sign of transgression, but bodies living in a condition of complexity. Complex bodies are the diffraction which interrupts the flow of power, the intermediation which makes (corporeal) exclusion part of the language of affirmation, the singularity of a body which struggles, as Luce Irigaray has said, "to be two," and, I would add, to be multiple.

For Stelarc, like Nietzsche before him, the body may be a bridge over the abyss, but where Nietzsche, the last and the best of all the modernists, turned back to a tragic meditation on the death of God, Stelarc makes of his own body its own horizon of the sometimes repulsive, sometimes fascinating, possibilities.

• Here your were referring to Stelarc’s use of technology to overcome the limitations of the body or to artistically complicate what is usually taken for granted, but which profoundly shapes and determines our existence. Do you think that art can make us aware of the limits of technology or should art be used precisely to challenge existing barriers in our technological envisioning of the world?

— Stelarc is the artist par excellence of complexity theory, making of his body a site for the study of what Katherine Hayles has described as "chaos and non-order." Refusing to be inscribed in the written word, Stelarc has written the language of complexity into the body itself, with its intermediations, diffractions, extrusions, and interruptions. Here finally, is a body, a body of complexity, which has artistically made of itself an unexpected ‘curve’ in the otherwise straight world of binary codes. With Stelarc, art is extruded consciousness which in its intensity challenges technology to reveal its hidden possibilities of creative complexity.

The nomination of the body as a crisis-centre, fit for immediate entry of the therapeutic agencies of the state and vulnerable to a moral wash of the guilt and repentance, is the trompe-l’oeil necessary to disguise and repress, the fact of the "disappearing body" as the faith of the late modernity. And the return of hyper-subjectivity is only a certain indication of the presence now of body invaders – from the fashion scene and panic viruses to the proliferating signs of consumer culture – as the language of postmodern power.

• Can we now, in the "late postmodernity" (as opposed to the late modernity of twenty years ago), still expect from the hyper-subjectivity to continue to emancipate and protect the integrity of our bodies and minds in front of the proliferating signs of consumer culture? Should it be a viable choice for all of us to transfer what you have called hyper-subjectivity into a certain kind of hyper-individuality, an anti-totalizing strategies for the third millenium?

— Or why not a more paradoxical strategy, one which simultaneously relishes the ethical singularity of the individual human life while seeking some excessive totalizations of its own—a totalization of social reciprocity, of mutual respect, of political peace? As the philosopher, George Grant, once said, we live now with a "patina of hectic subjectivity" in an increasingly sterile technological environment. Even the concept of totalization has been reduced in meaning to the imperial projection of economic and military interests by the powerful, with no sustaining value except abuse value. In this sense, "an anti-totalizing strategy for the third milenium" is a wonderful possibility, but shouldn’t the possibilities of totalization be recuperated for a proliferating new world of substantive human values? To do this would be to turn the enigma of technology with its doubled possibilities for despotism and creativity in an new epochal direction. In other words, why should we not finally invade the body invaders?