[Nettime-ro] ERRATUM: le corps postdramatique/ arts technologiques

[artcontemporain@fido.ca]

Book Launch in Prague, on March 2007
A special issue of ¡°Towards a New Aesthetics: Technology, Intensity,  
Heterogeneity¡±, a European Journal (biannual) in philosophy and  
comparative studies, attempts to explore and assess aspects of the  
contemporary ferment in aesthetics.
URL: http://litteraria.ff.cuni.cz/journals/current_issue.html

vol. 16 no. 32 Eds : Brian Rosebury & Louis Armand, Prague
ISSN  0862-8424

This special issue contains the essay ¡°Postdramatic Body: Human Body  
Dismemberment 2.1¡± by FLORIAN LIBER, visual and new media artist  
based in Montreal. You can also see in premiere vision digital images  
of synthesis presented by Liber in New York, on October 2006 at the  
time of the cyber dance performance of a projection installation in  
the middle of Lower Manhattan ([Re]Configurations: Arts, Humanities,  
and Technology in the Urban Environment).


INTRODUCTION
¡­ FLORI(A)N LIBER similarly examines spatial conceptions of  
signification but in terms of the event status of the performative  
body as technological prosthesis. In Liber¡¯s use of digital video,  
the performative body is not simply
encoded, mapped, transposed and thus captured ¨C submitted to a form  
of technical memory that at once seizes
and abolishes the performative event ¨C rather the body ¡°itself¡±  
becomes a zone of technicity. Consequently,
Liber¡¯s praxis tests the limits of an aesthetic theory of performance  
that rests upon the exclusion of any ¡°machinelike
technicity.¡± The ¡°body¡± in this case is not the represented body  
(e.g. the figure of the dancer in Liber¡¯s digital
video ¡°performance,¡± Human Body Dismemberment, see URL:  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvB19UQ6dss ), but the transcoded body,  
the body inscribed in and by a metamorphic algorithm (¡°le code  
plastique et gestuel¡±).46 It is a pro©\grammatic apparatus, or what,  
in French, may be described as an ¨¦criture au corps: a body of  
writing and an embodied writing. And it is in accordance with a  
technics of writing, of inscription and circumscription, but equally  
of gesture, that Liber¡¯s quasi©\analytic ¡°dismemberment¡± brings  
into question what Derrida has termed the ¡°inherited, ossified,  
simplified opposition between techn¨¥ and physis¡±47 ¨C that is to  
say, between technology and nature, the organic, the auto©\mobile and  
self©\sufficient.
In turn, this questioning implies a further examination of the  
opposition between the whole and the fragment,
the living body and the dead, already rendered ambivalent in Plato¡¯s  
treatment of the body as s¨­ma. Echoing
Artaud¡¯s conception of a corps sans organs and Victor Tausk¡¯s  
machine ¨¤ influencer, Liber¡¯s experiment in
performative dismemberment deconstructs the human/non©\human dichotomy  
and treats the ¡°body¡± as a
discursive, informatic topology which does not point towards a  
¡°post©\¡± human condition but rather to a
¡°prosthesis at the origin¡± of the human as such. In this way we are  
presented with what amounts to an attempt at
an ¡°enactment¡± of a critique. Liber¡¯s algorithmic dismemberments ¨C  
verging upon a type of quantum
indeterminacy ¨C situate in place of the functional body a body of  
probabilities, according to which ¡°machinality
(repetition, calculability, inorganic matter of the body) intervenes  
in a performative event,¡± as Derrida says, not
however as ¡°an accidental, extrinsic, and parasitical element,¡± or  
¡°pathological mutilating,¡± but rather as the
constitutive materiality of the body as dynamic system. And if ¡°to  
think both the machine and the performative
event together remains a monstrosity to come, an impossible event,¡±  
this is because it represents a violation of a
logic bound up with a certain intentionality, for which the possible  
is always and only a function of the calculable.
In pursuing the implications of an incalculability (at the very  
foundation of digital computing), Liber suggests
that this impossible event is, as Derrida argues, ¡°therefore the only  
possible event.¡± Moreover, ¡°it would be an
event that, this time, no longer happens without the machine. Rather,  
it would happen by the machine.¡±48
Elegance of symmetry in the view that poses the intelligible against  
the merely sensible, and each against the
insensible, remains ¨C even in its most elaborate, ¡°technological¡±  
forms ¨C cognate with what Claude L¨¦vi©\Strauss
described as analogical primitivism,49 and what John Ruskin in 1856  
termed the ¡°pathetic fallacy:¡± the ascription
of human aspirations and beliefs to the otherwise inanimate.50 The  
philosophy of perception, and consequently
aesthetics, has played a determinate role in fortifying this way of  
thinking, vested as it has often been in the
intuitive, the unreflexive, and the metaphysical. Such traits have not  
only come to define a certain humanism, but
also a logic according to which technicity remains the excluded other  
of the experiential realm. The paradox that
this presents for aesthetics as a theory of art has not gone  
unnoticed, and yet the division between pure and
applied art or between fine art and technics preserved itself into the  
twentieth century, according to which even
the cinematic image has been subjected to a curious humanizing bias ¨C  
most famously perhaps in Benjamin¡¯s
¡°The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.¡±
in Towards a New Aesthetics: Technology, Intensity, Heterogeneity

a r t c o n t e m p o r a i n/ new technology arts
MONTREAL, MMVII


_______________________________________________
Nettime-ro mailing list
Nettime-ro@nettime.org
http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-ro
-->
arhiva: http://amsterdam.nettime.org/