ABSTRACT
The Australian performance artist, Stelarc, has announced that ‘the body is obsolete’. Committed to a postevolutionary, extraterrestrial future, Stelarc’s work deorganizes the body by drawing attention to the way that technology extends, amplifies, invades and shapes contemporary bodies. Stelarc is not alone in believing that we need to dispense with the idea of the human body as an inviolable structure, contained by the skin, which produces but is never itself produced by, the technologies that it needs to continue its existence. There are distinct comparisons between the way that the soldier’s body is rendered docile and the way that power disciplined workers under the regimes of industrial capitalism. The fundamental basis of the capitalist system is a belief in the priority of the self-determining individual. According to the doctrine of liberal humanism, the ‘self’ is fundamentally rational, free and thus capable of making informed choices. The system of liberal democracy is, in fact, based on this idea.
