John Fare - The Scandal of the Missing Body (Parts)
- Audrone Zukauskaite -
The legend of John Fare—a performance artist who supposedly let a robot amputate his thumb, two fingers, eight toes, one eye, both testicles, his right hand and several random patches of skin before finally decapitating him—resurfaces every few years.1 What exactly is so scandalous about this? Can’t we just take it as a story among other stories—a text among other texts? It seems that the legend of John Fare strikes at the core of subjectivity—at the very idea that the subject must be an organized whole, where every part is subjected to the “I.” Allowing the disarticulation of one’s own body ruins the primary principle of this organization and creates what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call the “Body without Organs.” The BwO is not opposed to the organs but to the organism—the principle matter of signification and subjectification. The BwO does, however, oppose disarticulation, experimentation and desubjectification.2 The gradual amputation of the body parts in John Fare’s performances not only disarticulated his body but also ruined the principle of signification and interpretation.
So what does this mean? Nothing, really. There is nothing to interpret. Another frustrating thing is that John Fare’s death is “authorized” by a robot—a machine, which deconstructs the notion of subjective will. It seems that to die from the hand of the machine (if it even exists) is as desirable as to die from the hand of a beloved. What is so scandalous about these legendary performances, however, is that they were guided not by the death drive but by a program that produces a new type of connection between the disarticulated body and the machine:
What does it mean to disarticulate, to cease to be an organism? How can we convey how easy it is, and the extent to which we do it every day? And how necessary caution is, the art of dosages, since overdose is a danger. You don’t do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file. You invent self-destructions that have nothing to do with the death drive. Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity…” 3
New connections produce a new reality that is neither organic nor machinistic. “A” stomach, “an” eye, “a” mouth: the indefinite article does not lack anything; the indefinite article is the conductor of desire. It is not at all a question about a fragmented, splintered body of organs without the body (OwB). The BwO is exactly the opposite. Organs are not fragments of a lost unity. A distribution of intensive principles of organs, with their positive and indefinite articles, exists within a collective—a multiplicity inside an assemblage. The indefinite article is the conductor of desire. The dismantled body catches our desire. That is the very reason why a legend of an amputated and decapitated body is still alive. The indefinite article does not lack anything, but we feel the lack of this lack—the Lacanian definition of anxiety.
In “The Obscene Object of Postmodernity,” Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues that modern artwork is organized around a central absence. For example, in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot the main character is missing during the entire play, or in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up the plot is organized around a missing body. The postmodern, by contrast, displays the object directly, revealing its uncanny obscenity. John Fare’s performances add a new twist to this definition: the scandal of the postmodern is neither a scandal of the missing body nor of a potentially disappointing proximity of a present body. It’s a scandal of the indefinite article: there is a body, never yours or mine—dismantled, and probably missing some of its parts.
1. http://www.john-fare.com/threadsindex.html.
2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 2004), 177.
3. Ibid.