Bojan Anjelkovic The Technodispositifs of the Theatre Time Machine Noordung

In every dispositif, we have to distinguish between what we are (what we no longer are) and what we are becoming: the part of history, the part of currentness.1 Gilles Deleuze

Gesamtkunstwerk Noordung 1995-2045:: It is rather interesting that the work of Dragan ivadinov, who belongs to the underpopulated ranks of those Slovenian artists of whom much has been written, and continues to be written, in both scientific literature and the popular press, has yet to be fully investigated. Unlike the other two key members of the NSK collective, Laibach and Irwin, there is no scientific monograph on ivadinov and his work, despite the fact that the NSK Department for Theatre, Opera and Ballet played a crucial role in linking the NSK groups into a unified artisticstylistic formation known as retrogardism.2 This is particularly problematic due to two reasons. First, we are dealing with an art work that hinges precisely on its unity, which means that partial analyses of its constitutive parts (for example, individual theatre performances, art exhibitions, lectures, etc), or one of its aspects (theatrical, that is, artistic, techno-scientific, socio-political), are inadequate to understand it in its entirety; even worse, lacking deeper insight into the entirety of the work, such a partial analysis of constitutive parts and aspects cannot even be possible. And second, ivadinov was from the very beginning less interested in simply directing theatre performances than he was in creating a conceptual, unified piece of art, which is characterised particularly by the fact that it is processual, rather, that it comes into being in and through time. This holds true for all its stages of evolution: the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre (1983-1987), the Red Pilot Cosmokinetic Theatre (1987-1990), and the Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung (1990-present), where these phases are not separated by any clear boundaries signalling ivadinovs intent. Rather, these phases are, in a certain

Trans. note: In the interest of terminological consistency, I have taken the liberty of substituting dispositif for apparatus in all quotes from Deleuze and Agamben where the latter is used instead of the former. The terms are equivalent, and Foucault's original dispositif is now gaining currency in English. 2 Until then, Laibach had used the term retro-avant-garde, and Irwin later patented the term retro principle, but the term retro-garde is ivadinov's. For a problematisation of this terminology, see: Tine Hribar, Postmodernizem, transavantgarda in retrogardizem, Nova Revija, 1986.

sense, formally, thematically, and strategically inseparably linked. In other words, it is the ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk, a unified art work, which is inseparably linked to both the life of its artist and the socio-historical context in which it emerges which of course holds especially true for ivadinovs current 50-year work in progress, Noordung 19952045::. The 50-year theatrical process Noordung created by ivadinov and his collaborators is a complex, long-ranging investigative project, which officially began on 20th April 1995 at 10 pm, with a premiere and five imagined encores to take place every 10 years (20052015 20252035) on the same date, at the same time, and with the same actors until the year 2045. It is important for our purposes that the performance involves the process of substituting the bodies of actors, who will by then have died, with remote-control technological abstractions. In the first phase, the bodies of the deceased actors will be replaced by a remote-controlled sign, which will replace the actor in his or her mise-en-scene; but it will also include software capable of translating theatrical scripts into music when an actress dies, her script will be translated into a melody, when an actor dies, his script will be translated into a rhythm. In the final phase, at the end of all the processual and conceptual stages of the 50-year project when all the actors have died, but ivadinov is still alive (so goes the script) these technological actor substitutes are supposed to end in space, in a geostatic orbit, as 14 communication satellites floating in an arrangement inside 14 capsules within two tubular lines of a geostatic space station. ivadinovs script further dictates that these artistic satellites, named umbots,3 should include software known as syntapiens (synthetic homo sapiens), made up of three core programs encoded with the following information about the actors: a micronic sketch of the actors face, a collection of the actors movements, and the actors genetic code these will be, in conjunction with the biobibliographical information about each actor, beamed onto planet Earth and into the depths of space. According to ivadinov, the umbot should also possess a certain intelligence, and should be capable of developing self-consciousness. These post-gravitational forms like Malevichs planits will no longer have any immediate connection to Earth, and it will be possible to observe and investigate them as any other planets or even planetary systems.4

3 4

Trans. note: umbot = um oz. umetnost + robot, that is, mind or art + robot. Cf. Coordinates 26, Planits, and 31, Emancipation of the technological, in Dragan ivadinov, 50 Coordinates of Postgravitational Art, 2010, http://www.scribd.com/doc/31097592/50-kordinat.

The script further intends that following the conclusion of the project on 1st May 2045, ivadinov should commit suicide in space.5 We can currently point to at least three fundamental reasons why Noordung is a 50-year process. First, because of the theatrical demonstration of rupture with the traditional theatrical model, which is based on a dramatic text, in the form of its ritualised cessation (the actors scripts replaced with music). Second, due to the theatrical representation of the unstable relationship between the contemporary subject, that is, the body, and technology, through the processual replacement of deceased actors bodies with technological substitutes. And third, which also constitutes the deepest meaning of the work, due to the theatrical representation of time itself. Yet the latter is not merely a representation of linear time (actors die time passes), but some kind of theatrical representation of Nietzsches idea of eternal return (actors die, but we continue, 50 years later, to act out the same performance thus time stands still, or more precisely, time returns).6 Nietzsches mysterious idea, as Deleuze shows in his own most systemic work, is based precisely on difference and repetition more to the point, on repetition that alone creates difference, and thus creates something new which is the also the central starting point of the Noordung concept. This is made possible because what the repetition repeats is not what the past effectively was, but the virtuality inherent to the past and betrayed by its past actualization. In this precise sense, the emergence of the New changes the past itself, that is, it retroactively changes not the actual past we are not in

Here we are of course not interested in whether his plan will come to fruition, since we cannot know in advance, but are dealing primarily with the psychological techno-artistic, socio-political, and not least of all, ontological potential inherent in the project. Despite the fact that the script itself resembles a science-fiction novel, it is by no means impossible, even though the numerous unpredictable parameters on which it depends make it statistically unlikely and this is precisely the basis of the projects construction, and its stake. In other words, we are here dealing with the Noordung project as what it really is: a conceptual art work, that is, as absolute virtuality, which nevertheless possesses a minimal probability of self-actualisation (this probability, incidentally, grows higher every year as events develop), which, regardless of its final outcome, says a lot about the intersubjective relation between todays man and contemporary technology: about our entrapment by the dispositifs of the globalised, highly technologised society to which we belong, within which we work, and which make us what we are. 6 Cf. ivadinovs explanation of coordinate 17, Docking mechanism: When the system begins to connect, a deadly concentration sets in. Concentration, signification and control; concentration in orbit and control in dangerous sequences. In the module, we are sliding towards the last division of intellect. The planned act follows: due to the docking process we are in the energy hub of the event. There is no more room for our identification we are universal because the docking mechanism is processed with the scheme of systematic planetary organisation. That is why modular patterns of different time dispersions determine our present, which is located in the docking protocols of the universal! That is why there is no past and no future, only the absolute present! Theatre is the absolute present!

science fiction but the balance between actuality and virtuality in the past.7 The parallels between Deleuzes philosophical and ivadinovs artistic conceptualisations of difference and repetition do not end there: just as one of the strongest theses of Deleuzes book is that repetition is in strict opposition to representation, so the conceptual theatrical repetitions within the Noordung project stand in strict opposition to classical theatrical repetition, that is, representation based on mimesis.8 Conditioned as it is by high technology, the Noordung project is closely linked to contemporary science particularly to investigations in the field of cognitive sciences, along with communication, information, space, and biotechnological sciences while, on the other hand, involving a broad spectrum of investigative artistic practices: alongside the six performances that form the core time-structure of the project, there are numerous other integral parts, such as performances, informances, intermedial and conceptual exhibitions, book publications and conservation works, lectures and seminars, which enlighten and illuminate individual aspects of the project. The complexity of the project thus demands an interdisciplinary approach combining current philosophical, socio-political, and cognitive theories, anthropological, new media and software studies, and contemporary theory of art, theatre, and performance. We are convinced that such an approach is possible if we position Foucault's concept of the dispositif as the study's central theoretical point of departure.

What is a dispositif? Foucault uses the term dispositif (it first appears in his work sometime after the year 1970) in an attempt to contain two broad and heterogeneous fields, which through their intersubjective
7

Slavoj iek, Organs without bodies: Deleuze and consequences, Routledge, New York/London, 2004, p. 12. Incidentally, in this book iek makes a number of claims the most scandalous of which is definitely the assertion that Deleuze was an ideologue of late capitalism (p. 184) with which we cannot agree, even though ieks intention was, in his own words, to approach Deleuze from behind and to produce, according to Deleuzes philosophical recipe, his own illegitimate child. The problem at hand is that iek comes at Deleuze from behind with Hegels philosophical apparatus and not, for example, from in front with Spinozas, Bergsons, or Nietzsches, which would be much more logical and comfortable when penetrating Deleuzes philosophy. Suffice it to say that Nietzsche, without whom it is impossible to comprehend Deleuzes philosophy, has only two or three passing mentions in the entire book, which would be akin to somebody writing a book on ieks own theory, and only briefly mentioning Lacan twice and Marx once. 8 Here I am gesturing toward an excellent text by Alenka Zupani, in which she deconstructs and connects various philosophical and psychoanalytical attempts to grapple with the concept of repetition from Kierkegaard and Marx, to Deleuze and Lacan and shows how the concept of repetition is one of the main discoveries of modern thought, while simultaneously a crucial mechanism of comedy as a theatrical genre. Ponavljanje, Filozofski vestnik, XXVIII: 1, Ljubljana 2007, pp. 57-79.

relation continuously structure reality, but are never reducible to each other: the sayable is never within the visible, and vice versa: the visible is never within the sayable. There is thus no common ground for words and things, no objective view from the outside; rather, what holds them together is only ever the structuring of their relationship within the frame of knowledge-power mechanisms of a given dispositif. In other words, a dispositif is in a sense a field of forces, a heterogeneous cluster of discursive strategies and a non-discursive organisation of the visible,9 which enables the creation of precisely defined epistemological fields, that is, precisely defined processes of subjectivation. A careless reading of Foucault could lead one to conclude that he uses the word dispositif to denote only those large dispositifs of power such as the asylum, the clinic, the prison, the school, the police, the church, the factory, the law, sexuality, and so forth, and yet as Agamben suggest in his text What is a dispositif? the term can also encompass literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.10 Thus Agamben sees all of the following as dispositifs: the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, the cigarette, navigation, computers, the mobile telephone (as the ultimate dispositif), and finally even language itself, perhaps as the most ancient of all dispositifs. In the cited text, Agamben even suggests a general partitioning of all existence into two large groups: the first group consisting of living beings (or substances), and the other the dispositifs by which the first group is always captured. Following this generalised division of all things into two large groups, Agamben introduces a third: And, between these two, as a third class, subjects. I call a subject that which results from the relation and, so to speak, from the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses.11The subject is therefore the result, the effect of dispositifs, but simultaneously also a condition of their existence (the mobile telephone would not be any kind of dispositif, but merely an ordinary inanimate thing, were it not for the subjects who use it to communicate). Thus, for example, as a dispositif, the cinema creates the subject, but also includes contains it []: the subject is both the effect and condition.12

Cf. Mladen Dolar, Kralju odsekati glavo: Foucaultova dediina, Krtina, Ljubljana 2010, p. 28. Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 14 11 Ibid. 12 Melita Zajc, Tehnologije in drube, ISH Fakulteta za podiplomski humanistini tudij, Ljubljana 2000, p. 125.]
10

All technology thus prescribes a given dispositif. And yet a given technology can come into being only within the frame of the dispositif that enables it: Foucault shows how the rifle exists as a tool only in the sense that it is a machinery whose principle would no longer be the mobile or immobile mass, but a geometry of divisible [and composable] segments. Technology is thus social before it is technical.13 This is one of the links between Foucault and contemporary historians: on the subject of the flail, etc, Braudel says that the tool is a consequence and no longer a cause. On the subject of hoplitic arms, Detienne says that technique is in some way internal to the social and the mental.14 That technology is the consequence rather than the cause in no way signifies that technologies came into being following some sort of social plan, in line with social expectations, contingent on social organisation, etc, since that would mean that technology is in fact separate from the social. Deleuze and Foucaults point lies precisely in the fact that technologies are deeply and primarily social, even mental, and that it is specific technologies, prescribed by specific dispositifs, which make us what we are. In summary, the dispositif is the immanent cause of a given technology.15 A dispositif is thus not merely an inanimate thing, a cluster of prescriptions and user manuals it is a form of time structure, a temporal, dynamic process, it is an event within which the subject is captured. More precisely, as Deleuze points out, there are a minimum of two, even three subjects: the one who is (the one who no longer is), and the one who is about to become: We belong in these apparatuses and act in them. The newness of an apparatus in relation to those preceding it is what we call its currency, our currency. The new is the current. The current is not what we are but rather what we become, what we are in the process of becoming, in other words the Other, our becoming-other. In every apparatus, we have to distinguish between what we are (what we no longer are) and what we are becoming: the part of history, the part of currentness.16 When we speak of dispositifs, it may in this sense be better to speak of processes, or rather as Deleuze suggests about the lines of subjectivation, rather than subjects. Among other things, this means that every dispositif has an immanent specific historical formation, a specific historical package of instrumental and interpretative actions, which in some sense program the possible processes of subjectivation. This programming does not, of course, act with the aid
13 14

Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1988, p. 40. Ibid. p. 138. 15 What do we mean here by immanent cause? It is a cause which is realized, integrated and distinguished in its effect. Or rather the immanent cause is realized, integrated and distinguished by its effect. Ibid, p. 37. 16 Gilles Deleuze, What is a Dispositif? in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 19751995. New York, Semiotext(e); London: MIT Press, 2007, p. 345.

of a chip implanted directly into the cogito; rather, as Foucault showed with incomparable clarity and detail, the historical processes of disciplining the subject are always carried out with and through the body.

The dispositifs of the assemblage Noordung Despite the fact that the numerous theoretical conceptualisations of the Noordung project never mention Foucault or Deleuze it remains unclear whether ivadinov is even familiar with their concepts, and concretely, with the concept of the dispositif their artistic, sociopolitical, and techno-scientific structures and strategies are understood exactly in the sense of dispositifs, that is, as fields of power, knowledge-power mechanisms, which enable some and disable other process of subjectivation.17 This is clear in the very idea of the project as well as in ivadinov's numerous interviews, and especially in his text from the year 2010, 50 Coordinates of Postgravitational Art, in which he determines and deconstructs 50 terms crucial for the comprehension of the entire project, and which we are referencing here. There, among other things, art is defined as the machine of all machines, the machine, which fabricates other machines, while technology is the continuation of biological evolution, which can create different kinds of beings, made up of non-organic materials instead of biological cells18 ideas that could have been undersigned by Deleuze and Guattari. In other words, art and science are here understood as the only fields of knowledge that can create new and different forms of life, that is, new and different possibilities for subjectivation. For this to occur, it is necessary to free them from those (economico-political) forces that currently posses them, and link them with other forces with the (inhuman) forces of technology since in the final phase, technology, as Deleuze implicitly states in his book on Foucault, is nothing more than a force: The forces within man enter into a relation with forces from the outside, those of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic components which supersede the organism, or agrammaticalities which supersede the signifier. 19 It is extremely interesting that the Noordung project, as it was described in the first part of this

17

Knowledge of Deleuzes and Foucault's ideas is not even particularly necessary, since we can claim that, in a certain sense, the problematisation of the relation between subject and technology also forms the central starting point of the historical avant-gardes which Noordung directly appelates, as well as of contemporary technoart and technoscience in general. 18 Dragan ivadinov, op. cit. 19 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 131-132.

text, counts on precisely the computing, genetic, and agrammatical structures or forces that Deleuze writes about. Before we move on to the problematic of the dispositifs which can be traced within the Noordung project itself, allow us to introduce another terminological explanation: the rubric of dispositif will hereby include both concrete dispositifs that exist in reality, as well as (at least currently) conceptual, mental dispositifs. In the strictest Foucauldian sense, each dispositif is by definition a highly concrete if invisible machine. But in a certain sense, we can also speak of mental dispositifs insofar as we are dealing with a highly complex mental structure that opens new and different forms of thinking, that is, enables new and different forms of subjectivation. This second genre of dispositifs is of course most frequently found precisely in artistic thinking: that is how Alain Badiou, for example, in connection with the heteronymous writing process of Fernand Pessoa, speaks of dispositifs for thinking, while Gerard Wajcman, speaking of the status of the object in Duchamp, mentions the logical dispositif.20 Additionally, it makes particularly pertinent sense for an analysis of the Noordung project to introduce the operative category of conceptual dispositifs, since the majority of Noordungs mental dispositifs generally always represent potentially concrete theatrical-artistic, techno-scientific, and socio-political dispositifs. We are dealing with dispositifs that Noordung appellates, or rather, that it anticipates and conceptualises, but which have yet to occur and that do not exist in realty here we mean both the potentially concrete technodispositifs of the future, which have yet to come into being, as well as the numerous potential dispositifs of the past, planned by historical avant-gardes yet failing to truly materialise, or betrayed on the part of their past actualisation. If we now leave aside the division of dispositifs into the concrete and the conceptual, we can conditionally separate the dispositifs that project Noordung references and creates (or would like to create), into the political, artistic, and technological. Conditionally because we are unable to draw clear distinctions, since the idea of postgravitational art is inseparable from science or politics.21 Art is here namely linked with science and technology, a link that has
20

Cited from: Miklav Komelj, Pessoa, kraj, kjer se uti ali misli, in Fernando Pessoa, Psihotipija, Mladinska knjiga, Ljubljana 2008, p. 446; and Gerard Wajcman, Objekt stoletja, Analecta, Ljubljana 2007, p. 57. 21 Postgravitational art is, categorically, all art that will shape itself under conditions of zero gravity, and that will shape, under new living conditions, systems that we do not yet know. Postgravitational art is not an artistic stylistic formation and has no intention of becoming one. Thousands of years in gravity 1 have shaped all living and non-living things, and directly and indirectly have also shaped art, particularly its structural elements. Only the art of the twentieth century, in thinking through antiSemitism, conceptualisation, and teleology, opened up the field to gravity 0. The twenty-first century is

urgent political consequences. And in reverse: the political strategies of the Noordung project always have artistic and/or scientific implications, or rather, they are in the service of art and/or science. In other words, the lines or vectors of a specific dispositif, which primarily belongs to one field, always intersect the lines of the dispositifs from the other two spheres. As Deleuze points out: in each dispositif, the lines cross thresholds that make them either aesthetic, scientific, political, etc; these lines intertwine and mix together [where] some augment the others or elicit others through variations and even mutations of the assemblage.22 Flusser notes something similar when speaking of the classification of information which he divides into scientific or indicative (A is A), political or imperative (A ought to be A), and aesthetic or optative (let A be A). But following Flusser, since the information diffuses itself through distributive social apparatuses, which is of course merely another word for dispositifs, this is merely a theoretical division: every scientific indicative has political and aesthetic aspects, every political imperative has scientific and aesthetic aspects, and every optative (a work of art) has scientific and political aspects.23 The assemblage Noordung is thus a conceptually-concrete apparatus-triangle, which urgently requires all three dimensions to construe a fourth, located on the utopian point of gravity zero where art and the subject, along with the world of gravity 1, are supposedly abolished and established anew. From here on it would be more precise to say that the dispositifs of the dispositif Noordung can be divided into the primarily political, primarily artistic, and primarily technological even though technology, as we will see, plays a central role. The technopolitical dispositifs of the Noordung project encompass all those discursive and non-discursive political practices and structures that art in Slovenia appropriated at the beginning of the eighties. We are of course referring to the media-manipulative and organisational structures of the artistic collective Neue Slowenische Kunst, particularly the strategies of the Sisters Scipion Nasice Theatre from ivadinov's retrogardistic period, with all its evolutionary stages: the illegal (Hinkemann, 1984), the exorsistic (Marija Nablocka, 1985), and the classic phase (Krst pod Triglavom, 1986), as well as self-destruction (Dan mladosti, 1987). These and similar strategies are not discarded by ivadinov, who often likes to talk about his two (artistic) lives, after he leaves the NSK collective, as he would have us
developing its thinking about postgravitational art on the basis of avant-garde strategies of the previous century. Dragan ivadinov, op. cit. 22 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, What is a dispositif? op. cit, pp. 339 and 344. 23 Vilm Flusser, Toward a Philosophy of Photography, Reaktion Books, London, 2000, p. 53.

think. Rather, there exists a clear continuity between the first and the two later evolutionary stages, within the framework of the Red Pilot Cosmokinetic Theatre (1987-1990) and the Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung (1990-present). His theatrical-artistic methods and strategies are both then and now highly political, in the broadest and deepest, we could even say the Nietzschean-Artaudian sense of the word. It is no coincidence that ivadinov continually stages the play Love and Nation (Ljubezen in drava)24, which at its core speaks of the relationship between art and power, and could just as well be called Theatre and Nation and thus better reflect its contents. We are thus dealing with a relationship that, with the phrase theatre is nation, which we can already read in The First Sisterly Letter of the Sisters Scipion Nasice Theatre from the year 1983, becomes positioned as a fundamental starting point for ivadinov's retrogardistic period and simultaneously also his later, techno and postgravitational metamorphoses where we can say that it is gradually crossing over, with the new development of events, from a largely artisitc-aesthetic sphere into the real socio-political and techno-scientific sphere. Again and again, ivadinov's projects pose questions about the actual relationship between art and politics, and in the final phase, between art and reality, which is also clearly articulated by the strategic and economic involvement of the Noordung project in numerous socio-political and techno-scientific structures such as the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, the County of Vitanje, the European Space Agency, the Cultural Centre of European Space Technologies, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, etc. We can additionally highlight, as special conceptual political dispositifs, the past and current socio-political movements that ivadinov references in the frame of the Noordung project: Russian cosmism from the end of the 19th century and its younger heirs, anarcho-cosmism, and transhumanism.
24

ivadinov first attempted to stage Stojsavljevi's text approximately thirty years ago as his graduate performance at the Ljubljana Academy for Theatre, Radio, Film, and Television. However, just before graduating, he radically withdrew from the academy with a text meaningfully entitled A Letter to False Teachers. It was Love and Nation that served as the basis for the performance A Settled Sculpture One Against One (Naseljena skulptura ena proti ena), which is the originary show and thus the matrix of the entire Noordung project. He last recently staged Stojsavljevi's play in the Slovenian National Theatre Drama, but with a very different intent: if it is one of the core intentions of the 50-year theatrical performance to demonstably destroy the present dramatic template through a ritual replacement of the scripts of deceased actors with music then this time, ivadinov set himself an entirely different, diametrically opposed task: to stage this same dramatic text, wholly and literally, from beginning to end, without any major interventions. Even more, it was necessary to stage not only Love and Nation, but also Stojsavljeviev entire Elizabethan Trilogy, which also includes the plays Marlowe and Forbidden Theatre two dramas that ivadinov had already staged in previous years, including a prologue, so that it now all forms some sort of looming monster of a performance, almost 9 hours long, which will be, according to the artist, staged over the course of an entire week. The Elizabethan Trilogy project thus functions in the framework of the Noordung art work as a speaking conditionally classical-theatrical representation of a text, which is intended for demonstrative, ritual destruction.

The technoartistic dispositifs of the Noordung project can be divided into two groups: the historical, and the dispositifs inherent to the project itself. In the first group, we have all those artistic or theatrical dispositifs that arise from stylistic formations and ideas which the project indirectly or directly references as its historical supports: constructivism, suprematism, conceptualism, zenithism, futurism, retrogardism, and Artaud's theatre of cruelty, Craig's theatre of the uber-marionettes, Meyerhold's bio-mechanical theatre, etc. The second group consists of all those artistic or theatrical dispositifs that the project creates or conceptualises itself: blank-body directing, vector directing, emo-mechanics, microchoreography, visuallylinguistic abstraction, teleology, telecosmism, panoptical theatrical structures, informances, and so on. Along with constructivism, suprematism, and of course conceptualism, Artaud's theatre of cruelty is an important reference point for Noordung and crucial for any serious analysis of ivadinov's work, both in the framework of the Sisters Scipion Nasice Theatre, whose name is a clear Artaud reference, and in the last twenty years, within the timeframe of the Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung. Here Artaud's conceptualisation of bodies without organs seems particularly important; it was introduced by Deleuze and Guattari as one of their core philosophical concepts in the very first chapter of their first joint book: The body without organs is not the proof of an original nothingness, nor is it what remains of a lost totality. Above all, it is not a projection; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an image of the body. It is the body without an image.25 In short, the body is understood as it is in Nietzsche, as a combination of the balance of forces: the body is not a simple physical given, in the sense of a biological organism, but primarily as some sort of virtual dimension, immanent to this physical reality, around which a team of forces engages in battle. This technical term can be meaningfully applied to numerous ivadinov's theatrical and performative strategies (bio-mechanics or biomechatronics,

microchoreographic zones, emo-mechanics, etc), and it is particularly useful in the analysis and deconstruction of his conceptualisations of blank-body and vector direction, which are highlighted as crucial strategies of direction in postgravitational theatre. In the first case, in blank-body direction, the body without organs arises out of the very concept of a 50-year project that includes the ritual disappearance of the actors' physicality. In the second case, in vector directing, the body without organs arises out of a direct scenic practice in which the actors and the viewer's physicality exists in conditions of zero gravity that is, in an environment where there is no horizon, where dimensions don't mean much, and up-down,

25

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004.

left-right lose all meaning and where the distinction between actor and viewer, thus, between the theatrical object and subject, loses meaning in the moment when they find themselves in zero-gravity levitation, in a manner of speaking outside their physicality (such are also the reports of viewers, or more precisely, participants of the performance Gravity Zero: Biomechanics Noordung (Gravitacija ni: Biomehanika Noordung) from the year 1999, which took place in conditions of zero gravity in a Russian aircraft for parabolic flights used to train cosmonauts). The technoscientific dispositifs of the Noordung project can also be divided into external dispositifs, which the project integrates into itself, and the dispositifs that the project itself establishes and conceptualises. The most important (for now merely conceptual) technodispositifs from the first group are certainly the dispositifs that stem from Herman Potonik Noordung's idea of a geostationary space station, and from Clark's quantum computer (which in ivadinov's specific terminology denotes a computer capable of independent thought), where the latter, in the context of the Noordung project, is closely connected to the cognitive theory of Mitja Peru while both ideas are staged in Kubrick's famous film Odyssey 2001.26 This group also includes numerous other, more commonplace dispositifs that already exist in reality, dispositifs from information-, communication-, space-, and bio-technologies. The second group, on the other hand, includes (currently conceptual) technoscientific dispositifs, which arise out of terms created for the purposes of this project: syntapiens, umbot, biomechatronic objectiles, etc. That the majority of tecnodispositifs which the Noordung project depends on does not yet exist does not mean that the technological forces of the future are not already hard at work: with the introduction of technologies and gadgets such as virtual reality, the internet, the mobile telephone, the handheld computer, GPS navigator, portable media player or iPod, tablet computer or iPad, and so on and so fort, the borders between the actual and the virtual are becoming unstable; we have not abandoned our bodies and our physical reality to set out on neverending spiritual wanderings across virtual worlds, as it was forecast when intelligent technology was at its opening stages quite to the contrary, virtuality came to us, it is here in the actual world, surrounding and changing our physical bodies.

26

Incidentally, there exist numerous others conceptual and strategic parallels between Odyssey 2001 and the Noordung project (the perspective on non-contemporaneity, a geneology of technology/the subject, the black monolith/black square, posthumanism, etc), which is certainly no coincidence: both Kubrick's film and ivadinov's project pose and attempt to solve, in similar ways, a precisely delineated Nietzschean problem that I will return to in the final portion of this text.

We have explained what we mean by the term dispositif, but what are we pointing to with the word techno, which we continually use as a prefix? We cannot find a better answer to this question than the one given by Janez Strehovec in his book on technoculture, where techno is of course understood not only as a musical genre, but significantly broader, as a principle of today's world formed in the paradigm of the second order artificial. What is meant here is the artificial that has crossed the boundary of the mechanical and directed itself toward the field of cybernetics, and even toward the paradigm of bio, that is to say, toward life-resembling processes borne by inorganic bearers. [] Techno means an intensified and accelerated syntheticity, artistry squared, and an expansion of reality in terms of its increase, its upgrade. With this upgrade we are within the paradigm of the second order artificial [], alongside which a new type of techno-modelled perception is being shaped, along with its subject: the aesthetic man in the techno paradigm.27 It thus refers to a broader concept of technology, such as occurs, for example, in the works of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, or Wilem Flusser: This type of technology is using Benjamins terminology second order technology; it is based on the individuals distancing from nature, more concretely, from the reproduction of natural forms, within which the so-called first order technology was trapped. Of the achievements of this first technology we can say that they culminate in human sacrifice; while those of the second order culminate in a remote-controlled airplane, which does not require a human crew. (emphasis mine).28 In this sense, I am very interested in the answer that Dragan ivadinovs gives (as an artist planning to place a remote-controlled, crewless airplane into a geostatic orbit 35 900 km from Earth as a culmination of his lifelong project) to my question about the meaning of the large sign spelling out TECHNO, which appears at the end of his performance of Marlowe and which will also conclude his upcoming nine-hour performance of Stojsavljevis Elizabethean Trilogy when it is staged in its entirety. ivadinov draws a distinction between the term techno and the Greek techne, as well as the English technology, and defines it as emancipated technology; something that will become independent of us as biological. For him, techno denotes a natural emancipation, an emancipated entity, which has its entirely own life. And more: Techno is the evolutionary process of the biological. Just so

27 28

Cf. Janez Strehovec, Tehnokultura kultura tehna, tudentska zaloba, Ljubljana 1998, p. 17. Ibid.

we are clear, I am not a futurologist, I do not speak of what will be, but of what has potential.29

On the death of man and superman The problematisation of the relation between the contemporary subject, that is, the body, and technology, is certainly the general position of numerous contemporary investigative theatre and artistic practices, and yet there are few works within this multitude that also offer answers - or offer them with the kind of almost scientific consistency, methodicalness, and clarity as Dragan ivadinov's 50 year Noordung project. It is extremely interesting that Noordung 1995-2045::, the way we described it in the first section of this text, sets and similarly attempts to solve a problem identical to Foucault's Nietzschean problem as it was formulated by Deleuze in the highly important annex to his Foucault book entitled On the death of man and superman.30 Every body, or every form, is a combination of the relation of forces in the frame of a given dispositif. This is a general Foucauldian principle. These forces are always in relation to forces that come from the outside, from some other dispositif. This is how a new form is created. If we take, for example, the forces within man (the forces of imagining, remembering, desiring, etc), we can say that such forces necessarily intervene in the composition of human form. And yet these same forces can also be invested differently, into some different combination of forces, into some different form. Even if we take a short period of time, says Deleuze, man has not always existed and will not exist forever (what is meant here is of course not the human race, but the man as an object of science an object of knowledge, constituted by Kants Copernican turn and the humanistic sciences created in the nineteenth century: biology, political economy, and linguistics.31) For the human form to appear, it is necessary for forces within man to enter into a relation with precisely determined

29

The interview can be heard on the Radio tudent website: http://www.radiostudent.si/article.php?sid=20488. Accessed on 18. October 2011. 30 Foucault, pp. 124-132. This annex is hereby summarized. 31 Cf.: The epistemological field traversed by the human sciences was not laid down in advance: no philosophy, no political or moral option, no empirical science of any kind, no analysis of sensation, imagination, or the passions, had ever encountered, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, anything like man; for man did not exist (any more than life, or language, or labour); [] [M]an, whether in isolation or as a group, and for the first time since human beings have existed and have lived together in societies, should have become the object of science []: it is an event in the order of knowledge. Foucault, The Order of Things, Routledge, 2001, pp. 375-376.

forces from the outside. Deleuze, following Foucault, describes three large metadispositifs or historical formations: the first is a classical historical formation, the second a historical formation of the nineteenth century, and the third a historical formation of the future. Since the latter is yet in the process of generation, we are unable to predict what it will look like. It is a concrete problem which Nietzsche named the superman [Ubermensch]. Nietzsche's idea of the Ubermensch has nothing to do with a perfected man, with some kind of superhero. Even though the Slovenian prefix nad32 denotes something above man, Nietzsche's Ubermensch is simply something that is not man is beyond man. Nietzsche never tired of repeating that man is merely a bridge, something over/through which the superman can come into existence. In other words, the superman is a new form that is yet to be generated, when the forces that form the shape of man enter into a relation with some other, historically precisely determined outside forces. Nietzsche said: man has enslaved life, labour, and language the superman is the one who will free them within man himself, to the benefit of some other form. As Deleuze points out, this is a problem around which we must satisfy ourselves with highly tentative signifiers, lest we descend to the level of cartoon. However, even though we are as yet unable to speak about this new form, we can sense the forces from the outside with which the forces within man enter into a relation. Man has enslaved the forces of life, labour, and language by fragmenting and dispersing them with the aid of new scientific disciplines which stem from biology, political economy, and linguistics: [...] nineteenth century humanist linguistics was based on the dissemination of languages, as the condition for a 'demotion of language' as an object [...].33 The same holds true for biology, which demoted life, and political economy, which demoted labour. Today, of course, the problem lies in how to regroup the dispersed forces within man. Deleuze does not leave this task to science, nor politics, philosophy, or art. The forces capable of regrouping dispersed forces within man, and with which the latter now enter into a relation, are the forces of technology: It seems to us, though, that when dispersed labour and life were each able to unify themselves only by somehow breaking free from economics or biology, just as language manage to regroup itself only when literature broke free from linguistics. Biology had to take a leap into molecular biology, or dispersed life regroup in the genetic code. Dispersed work had to regroup in thirdgeneration machines, cybernetics and information technology. What would be the forces in
32 33

Trans. note: nadlovek = superman. Foucault, 130-131.

play, with which the forces within man would then enter into a relation? It would no longer involve raising to infinity or finitude but an unlimited finity, thereby evoking every situation of force in which a finite number of components yields a practically unlimited diversity of combinations. [...] The forces within man enter into a relation with forces from the outside, those of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic components which supersede the organism, or agrammaticalities which supersede the signifier.34 The link between the conceptual speculation of the Noordung project and the computer, genetic, and agrammatical (technological) structures or forces of the future, which Deleuze describes in the above-cited text, could not be clearer; the Noordung project sets itself no less than a fifty-year historical period in which to investigate their impact on man, which is more than enough time for the specific processes which were only coming into effect at the time of Deleuze's writing, and at the start of the Noordung project, to make themselves more clearly visible.

34

Ibid. 131-132-