The Extra Ear of the Other: On Listening to Stelarc

The ear, as Jacques Derrida poignantly observes, is uncanny: it is double in more than one sense. First of all, it is always that of the other (ear). The ear can also be open and closed at the same time. The only organ that cannot voluntarily shut itself, it always remains ready to hear, to receive, even if its “owner” is not actively listening. The very possibility of speaking and writing, and thus of communicating, exchanging and, more generally, of being with others comes from the ear. But what happens when the ear wanders down from the side of one’s head to one’s arm – as it does in the Australian artist Stelarc’s most recent art project, Extra Ear: Ear on Arm (2006-07) – and when it mutates from a receiving to a transmitting organ? Stelarc’s Extra Ear mimics the actual ear in shape and external structure but, rather than merely hearing, it will wirelessly transmit sounds to the Internet, thus becoming a remote listening device. The Extra Ear inevitably draws in the observer’s eye; it attracts a curious gaze while also encouraging a cross-sensual exchange between bodies and organs which goes beyond the functionalism of information exchange. But what is Stelarc trying to say with this Extra Ear? And what would it mean to really h-ear him, and respond to him?

Stelarc’s recent visual and aural performances shift bodily architecture into the hybrid terrain of walking heads, hearing arms and fluid flesh (Walking Head Robot, (2006) and Blender, (2005) – with Nina Sellars). Stelarc’s invitation, extended to his audience, to open up to his reconstructive and often invasive bodily projects, at times seems to fall on deaf ears, which is why some responses to his work end up in a solipsistic, and often moralistic, position of not hearing him at all, and of deciding in advance what he is trying to say and why it is wrong. The artist’s provocative statements that “the body is obsolete” and that we need to devise alternate anatomical architectures which are not available in evolution but which become possible through engineering, are often interpreted as simply meaning that the body is both inadequate and unnecessary, that it is only an obstacle in our “technological age”. The French philosopher Paul Virilio even went so far as to accuse Stelarc of enacting a new version of “clinical voyeurism”: a dangerous strategy aimed at improving the human, but ultimately signalling, for Virilio, both the end of art and the end of humanity. So what does it mean to really hear Stelarc and respond to him? How can, or should, we engage with his Stomach Sculpture (1993), Partial Head (2006), or Extra Ear? On what grounds can Stelarc’s projects themselves be described as respons-ible (or not)? What values does his reworking of the architecture of the body challenge, and does this challenge imply any broader epistemic transformation?

Stelarc repeatedly tell us that he has no ambitions to be a philosopher or a political theorist. He refuses to be prescriptive in his work, and so will not instruct us as to how we should treat our bodies or how we should coexist with technology. However, I believe listening to Stelarc will allow us to envisage a more effective politics and ethics. This will be a technopolitics of distributed agency and suspended command, informed by an ethics of infinite – and at times crazy, shocking and excessive – hospitality towards the alterity of technology (that is always already part of us). This is not to say that “we are machines” or that “we are all Stelarcs now,” as Arthur and Marilouise Kroker put it. As humans and machines are collapsed – as they tend to be in some current accounts of “the network society” – into a fluid epistemology in which difference is overcome for the sake of horizontal affective politics, it is not clear any more who encounters, responds to, and is responsible for, whom in an ethical encounter and, what is more important, why it should matter at all. This is why I want to suggest that we need to retain, even if while placing it in suspension, this idea of the human (and that of the body). The narrative of seamless coevolution between different biological and cultural entities that depicts the whole world as “connected”, it seems to me, threatens to overlook too many points of temporary stabilisation that have a strategic political significance. It is via these “points of temporary stabilisation” that partial decisions are being made, connections between bodies are being established, aesthetic and political transformation is being achieved, and power is taking effect over different parts of “the network” in a differential manner. And yet at the same time, “the human” should not be seen as an essential value or a fixed identity but rather as a strategic quasi-transcendental point of entry into debates on agency, human-technology, environment, politics and ethics. Ethical thinking in terms of “originary technicity” which brings forth the very concept of the human allows us to affirm the significance of the question of responsibility, without needing to rely on the prior value system that legislates it, or resort to unreconstructed moral convictions. This responsible response to the difference of technology – which is not all that different - is one non-didactic lesson we can learn from Stelarc.

Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Stelarc’s website: http://www.stelarc.va.com.au

This is an edited excerpt from ‘The Extra Ear of the Other: On Being-in-Difference’, an essay in a catalogue accompanying the exhibition of Stelarc’s work (1-30 June 2007) at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide.