Inventarios

The fact that subjects face a radical change in the belief in the big Other or that they know very well that the big Other actually does not exist, does not mean that the symbolic structure is not operative. Subjects are still very much marked by the symbolic prohibition, although they might no longer identify with the authorities who are supposed to be bearers of this prohibition.

The symbolic structure today appears increasingly replaced by imaginary simu- lacra with which the subjects identify. Life seems like a computer game in which the subject can play with his or her identity, can randomly follow fashion rituals and can have no strong national or religious beliefs. But the fact that life appears as a screen on which everything is changeable has resulted in a desperate search for the real behind the fiction. The cuts in the body thus appear as an escape from the imaginary simulacra that dominate our society.

Young people usually explain their obsession with tattooing and body-piercing as ways to escape the pressures of the dominant fashion industry. The media constantly bombard them with images of beauty, and one of the ways to escape this enforced identification is to take a real action – to mark the body in a way that cannot be changed.

In recent years, social theory has widely discussed the issue of identity, which appeared not only as something socially constructed but also as something multi- form and changeable. The discussions of performativity and sexual difference also created the impression that the subject can play with his or her sexual identity. From clitoridectomy to body art 31

The paradox of the contemporary cuts in the body is that they seem at the same time to be a realization of these beliefs and a reaction against them. Making a cut in the body does not mean that the subject is merely playing with his or her identity; by irreversibly marking the body, the subject also protests against the ideology that makes everything changeable. The body thus appears as the ultim- ate point of the subject’s identity. Since the subject does not want simply to play with the imaginary simulacra presented by the dominant fashion ideologies, he or she tries to find in the body the site of the real.

For the group of artists united in the project Body Radicals,5

the body is today the only remaining realm over which an individual has retained power:

Unmediated, direct access to the inner being through the artist’s own blood or the feeling of pain opens up almost Artaud-like perspectives. What is happen- ing is literal. There is no simulation. The symbolic field of the art is collapsing, bodies become black holes into which symbolic significance implodes.

(Body Radicals’ Home Page http://www.chapter.org/november97/bodyradicals/index.html)

The thesis presented in the last sentence is a very pretentious one, since the Body Radicals still call themselves artists and their artworks are usually presented in art galleries: they may not be accepted by the mainstream art community, but they none the less very much want to be recognized in the alternative spaces of the ‘symbolic field of art’. This demand for social recognition already proves that, in the new forms of body art, we are not dealing with some kind of generalized psychosis or with the total collapse of the symbolic order. However, the use of the body in contemporary art does deal with the contemporary subject’s problem in searching for something real in the form of his or her body.

Although the artists united in the Body Radicals use their bodies in very differ- ent ways in their artworks, one can find some similarities between them. For the purpose of my analysis here, I will focus only on the work of Orlan and Stelarc.

Orlan’s6

art consists primarily of multiple plastic surgery operations on her face, which are recorded and, with the commentary of her voice, presented in art galleries. When Orlan provides theory about her art, her primary point is that she uses her body as a site of public debate. Her art challenges the standards of beauty; it explores the variety of body-images that are outside the norms and dictates of the dominant ideology. When she plays with the images of femininity, her intention is to practice a transsexuality of woman to woman, which, however, does not follow the usual transsexual desire to have a defined and definite identity. Orlan also claims that, with the help of surgery, one can bring the internal image closer to the external one; she therefore does not need to identify with the image that nature had given her. With the help of surgery, her body is transformed into language (‘flesh becomes word’). Orlan also plans to be mummified after her death and placed in an art gallery.

Orlan therefore tries to play with multiple identities, to make her body a changeable work of art and, in doing so to achieve some kind of immortality. She 32 Renata Salecl

describes her work as a self-portrait, which is presented as an inscription in the flesh made with the help of the new technologies. Orlan’s intention is to impose control, not only over her naturally given body image but also to manipulate the new technologies (like plastic surgery) and use them against the ideals of the dominant ideology.

When Orlan objects to the idea that she is performing some kind of self- mutilation, she comes very close to the defenders of clitoridectomy. Orlan claims that her body transformation augments her power and does not diminish it. Similarly, the defenders of clitoridectomy say that the ritual of circumcision actu- ally gives women power they did not have before initiation. And when Orlan says that she transforms her body into language, she caricatures initiation rituals, which in their own ways also mark the body with language.7

If, in the pre-modern type of society, initiation has a very specific role in assigning the subject’s sexual identity and in imposing a mark of social prohibition onto the body, then one cannot say that, in post-modern society, initiation rituals still play the same role. The insistence on clitoridectomy in the case of the African immigrants in the West or among very developed African countries, for example, can be understood as a specific answer to the deadlocks of contemporary society. The class antagonisms of post-industial society, the globalization of capital, the erosion of tradition, all brought the subject to the point of searching for some stable form of identity. The African immigrants may still respect their grand- mothers enough to allow them to perform the act of initiation, while they have an utter mistrust of other authorities in the society they live in. Here, we also have the case of disbelief in the fiction of the big Other in contemporary society; thus the insistence on old rituals of initiation must be understood as an answer to this disbelief, that is, as an attempt to find in the body a place of some stable identity.

When the body artists caricature initiation rituals or play with the same new forms of tribalism, they are trying to challenge precisely the idea of stable identity, while they none the less try to find in the body some piece of the real. In their own way, the body artists are also dealing with the deadlocks of today: with their cuts in the body, they challenge the idea that the body can give the subject the basis for an identity. So they are actually searching for what is supposed to be behind the body. If the body is just a playground for various identities, what is real here?

For Orlan, the final, unchangeable thing becomes her voice. With the help of her voice, Orlan tries to provide explanations for her art: she thus reads from theoretical texts as her face is cut and comments on the procedure of her surgery. But behind this search for meaning for her changeable face, her voice remains a constant. Orlan’s voice is the drive, that is, the real, that stays the same throughout her performances. Plastic surgery of Orlan’s face is painful to watch; for observers it is not only shocking to see Orlan’s skin being detached from her face, but also to hear her monotonous voice reciting texts during her surgery. If Orlan were to be quiet, the observers might be able to pretend they were seeing a deeply anaes- theticized, dead-like person being cut on the stage. In this case, the shock for the observers would not be so very different from that of watching horror movies: when one does not want to see a scary scene in the film, one simply closes one’s From clitoridectomy to body art 33

eyes. Of course, in horror movies one still hears the music and the screams, but the voice without the picture is less frightening, since the voice loses power when it is not accompanied by the picture. But in the case of Orlan, it is the voice that is the real site of horror. If one only listens to her voice and keeps one’s eyes shut, one does not get relief, since Orlan’s voice is the sign of deadliness and of life at the same time. As such, the voice is a death drive that always undermines the subject’s identity. Orlan tries to show with her art how she can play with her identity, but her voice none the less remains the real her, as if her voice is more herself than she is.

Some other artists are trying to find a piece of the real beyond the skin with the help of computer technology, and in this endeavor they also try to replace the human voice with a computerized sound. The Australian artist Stelarc, for example, questions the role of the body in the post-industrial age. His thesis is that, with the new developments in technology, the body became obsolete, since it is biologically ill-equipped for the technological level of contemporary society. Stelarc wants to create some kind of new meta-body, which first needs to pacify and anaesthetisize the existing body. With the help of genetic technology, the organs become replaceable, the skin more durable, the body starts acting without expectation; it produces movements without memory, has no desires, and so on. In this way, the self can be placed beyond the skin and connect itself with the virtual world. The body becomes a phantom body, which plays with its images and connects itself with the immortal machinery. Reproduction is substituted by redesigning and sexual intercourse is replaced with the interface between the subject and the machine. In such a virtual world it seems that we no longer have to deal with birth or death. Stelarc thus wants to make life eternal. In the end, this life would be nothing but a symbolic fiction, but a fiction that would, none the less, eliminate the trauma of the unsymbolizable real. As such, life would cease to be life, too.

Both interventions in the body – clitoridectomy and these practices of body art – pose numerous questions about the subject in the post-modern world. Some see the main problem of contemporary society as being the total erosion of the symbolic network, which results in some kind of generalized perversion or even psychosis. Others take the dissolution of the patriarchal system of social author- ities as signalling the possibility for subjects to form their own identities without submitting themselves to the imposed normative ideals. But the changed relation of the subject to the symbolic order in contemporary society should be taken neither as a total catastrophe nor as an opening up of unlimited possibilities. The disbelief in the big Other has, on the one hand, incited people’s return to such cruel initiation rituals as clitoridectomy and, on the other, it has instigated the self-imposed cuts in body art. But is this the only way to respond to the fact that the Big Other does not exist? Are there no other ways of dealing with the inconsistency of the symbolic order?

Notes

1 The United Nations data shows that there are 130 million women in the world today whose genitals have been mutilated. This practice is widespread in Africa, in some Asian countries and among immigrants from these places in the West.

2 Although clitoridectomy is prevalent in communities that practice Islam, this ritual is not linked to Islam much less prescribed by the Qur’a¯n. In the past, clitoridectomy was sometimes also performed by Catholics, Protestants, Copts, and other religious groups. The Catholic Church never officially distanced itself from clitoridectomy: the missionar- ies in Africa, for example, did not condemn this practice. Only the Anglican Church, in the 1920s, denounced this ritual and advised its missionaries to prevent it (Dorkenoo 1994; Lefeuvre-Deotte 1997; Maertens 1978).

3 Note that so-called female circumcision is the mildest form of the deformations of female genitals, since circumcision removes only the prepuce that covers the clitoris. Much more severe and also much more widespread is so-called excision, which removes the whole of the clitoris. Even more common and painful is the ritual of infibulation, which means the removal of the clitoris and the labia. This practice causes numerous infections and many women die because of it.

4 The defenders of clitoridectomy who invoke the aesthetic dimension of this ritual usu- ally say that it should be compared with the Western obsession with Western beauty ideals, which lead Western women to undergo painful plastic surgery operations, use tattoos, and so on.

5 The group Body Radicals includes such artists as Orlan, Ron Athey, Stelarc, Franko B and Annie Sprinkle. While they all use their own bodies as their artistic means of expression, their art and the explanations they give for it differ significantly.

6 For an extensive analysis of Orlan’s art, see Adams (1996).

7 Artists Ron Athey and Franko B caricature various forms of initiation rituals in their performances, in which they primarily play with blood, shit and other bodily discharges.

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