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The Revelation of TechnēGianna BouchardPublished online: 06 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Gianna Bouchard (2005) The Revelation of Technē, Performance Research: A Journal of thePerforming Arts, 10:4, 24-32, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2005.10871448

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The Revelation of Techne An anatomical theatre

GIANNA BOUCHARD

Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens.

(Martin Heidegger 1978: 319)

In his 1954 essay The Que..6tion Concerning Technology, Heidegger introduces to under­standings of technology a complex set of relations between knowledge and truth, and economies of vision and obfuscation. In his quest for the 'essence' of technology, Heidegger adopts an etymological approach to the problem by engaging with the Greek term techne, which was one of three branches of knowledge defined by Aristotle, alongside eputeme and phron_..6i..6. In their most basic formulations, technerelates to skill and craft in the form of practical knowledge; eputemerelates to theoretical or scientific knowledge; and phronet.u connotes a practical wisdom, predicated on ethical values and comprehension. For Aristotle, techne desc­ribed a productive skill that involved a 'reasoned state of capacity to make', where the emphasis was on the creator and 'not in the thing made' (Aristotle 1984: 18oo). Such practical knowledge was very much allied with copying or completing what was already in existence in the natural world. Techne, as a branch of knowledge, was invested with the skill and understanding to create things through enabling them to come into being and by making manifest articles and objects from nature.

Through this etymological analysis, Heidegger focuses on this aspect of technethat

is concerned with 'becoming' or 'bringing into being': 'Techne is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiet.u; it is something poetic' (Heidegger 1978: 318). Techne's relation to eputememeans that both are embedded in 'knowing', through extended knowledge, comprehension and the formation of the expert, which provides 'an opening up', and, as such, techne is a mode of revealing:

Techne . .. reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us .... What is decisive in techne does not at all lie in making and manipulating, nor in the using of means, but rather in the revealing .... It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth.

(Heidegger 1978: 318)

Aristotle's approaches to understandings of knowledge are inevitably caught up in discursive arguments about truth, which is necessarily at the centre of these epistemologi­cal paradigms, for appropriate and valued knowledge must surely be based on what is 'true' and valid. For the ancients, techne, eputeme and phronet.u were all about presencing as a mode of truth through revelation and uncovering, which Heidegger then engages with in relation to technology.

Medical science has long been invested in the visual disclosure of what is normatively unseen in the body through technological means, drawing upon a complex historical and

Performance Research 10!41, pp.24-32 © Taylor & Francis Ltd 2005 24

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philosophical relation to the Aristotelian notion of techne. This essay will interrogate Heidegger's analysis of techne as a mode of revelation and its impact on potential readings of the body when such medico-technology is used in performance. Heidegger's suggestion that there is a constant tension between this mode of revealing and a simultaneous obscuring of the object will be considered in relation to a specific performance moment in the work of Socletas Raffaello Sanzio. The piece incorpo­rates the insertion of fibre optic technology into the body of the actor and so draws attention to certain systems of relation that usually go unnoticed and unremarked in theatre studies. The bringing to visibility so fundamental in medicine in order to diagnose and treat pathologies is usurped to reveal specific relations implicit to the theatre.

As we have noted, Heidegger's understanding of the technological is predicated on a visual economy and the various tensions that exist within it and which have been manifest throughout medical history. Prior to the Renaissance and the emergence of Andreas Vesalius, medical training and practice was segregated by Aristotle's epistemological distinctions between techne and eputeme. As a practical skill and, what was then considered to be, a form of manual labour, the surgeon's domain was thought to reside within the remit of techne: ' ... a gulf opened between doctors and surgeons, who were gradually identified, the former as theoreticians (thus as clerks), the latter as practitioners (thus as laymen)' (Pouchelle 1990: 21). The surgeon's work was focused on external pathologies and trauma that required incision, excision, phlebotomy and amputation, from knowledge gained as an apprentice in the field. Within the anatomy theatres of the time, it was the surgeon who dissected the body, under the instruction and guidance of the physician, in much the same way as medical treatment and care was meted out. At the sickbed, the physician would indulge in little contact with the patient's body,

depending instead on his theoretical knowledge, or eputeme, for his diagnostic acumen. Surgeons and apothecaries would then carry out doctor's orders and prescriptions. It was this direct and defiling contact with the body and its fluids that partly influenced the lowly status of the surgeon, contaminated as he was by the body's corruption and excesses.

Dissection, then, was literally in the hands of the surgeon, who wielded the knife and incised the body efficiently by reason of his practical experience accrued in the field. In the incisive act was the potential to demonstrate anatomical knowledge as true by revealing, through techne, explicit assertions about the body. This possibility, however, was confounded by a quite different conception of knowledge from that espoused by Heidegger, and representative of modern understandings, which could not identify with the cadaver as a phenomenal entity, capable of delivering its own truths. The technology of dissection was only suited to display the body at this pre-modern stage: it could not produce demonstrable, true knowledge because that existed only in textual form, outside of the body itself and the work of the dissector. The book was considered to be the repository of intellectual truth about the body and occupied a position of prominence in the pre-sixteenth century anatomy theatre.

Textual knowledge was valued above all else in the medical faculty, as early modern medicine engaged with the tenets of humanism, which were founded on a renewed interest in Greek and Roman texts, ideas and values. Teaching centred on reading and debating these texts, with assessment of knowledge-acquisition based on a student's ability to regurgitate by rote staple answers from them. Looking inside the body and any form of dissection within this text-based frame became a means of consolidat­ing this process of memorization through visual cues and representations. To see corporeal structures and observe physiological functions in the body served as part components of memory architecture, arguably more effective

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than two-dimensional diagrammatic artist impressions. It was simply a didactic tool, rather than an interrogative or analytical procedure, assuming as it did, that the 'truth' of the body had already been revealed and articulated in written form by the ancients. With apparently truthful knowledge situated in the text, the surgeon, or .~Jector, at the dissection only had to display the relevant anatomical parts to substantiate the text. In other words, revelation was of the veracity of the text, rather than of the body, which became a peculiarly passive object on the anatomy table, capable only of upholding words rather than demon­strating them. Heidegger's relation of truth and the visibility of knowledge through demonstra­tion is here unhinged, in a model of epistem­ology that elects the revealed as of secondary importance to the text, adept only at verifying knowledge already amassed and which certainly has no place in challenging or subverting those findings.

Medical humanism and its concentration on textual authority displaced the potential for the revelation of truth in dissective practice by separating the practical skill inherent in techne from the Heideggerian notion of an exponent visual economy existing within its parameters. Arguably, medical humanism made its prac­titioners and followers 'blind' in some senses to various sights, or, at the least, unwilling to look afresh or even again at textual claims. The anomalous and the incongruous were not acknowledged and practices, such as dissection, were far from revelatory or exploratory. Rather, they reinforced and underpinned textual ideologies. To enable the technology of dissection to become capable of unveiling knowl­edge, there needed to be a paradigmatic shift in thinking about the body and the source of authoritative and legitimate knowledge about it.

The body needed to be conceived of as a unique occurrence, distinct from the ancient texts, to be experienced and interrogated by the anatomist, rather than merely displayed by the surgeon. Jonathan Sawday locates this shift of

relation and understanding within the period of the Renaissance, when the body itself became identified as the 'liber corporum - the book of the body written by God' (Sawday 1995: 135). At this historical moment, technewas given the potential to bring forth truth about the body as the physician-anatomist was charged with uncovering the secret marvels of God's handiwork and architectural genius inside the human frame:

knowledge itself ... was at a point of metamor­phosis: ... the anatomist who searched in the body for its structure rather than in the texts of ancient authority ... was the concrete represen· tative of a new conception of knowledge, one that professed to rely on the experience of phenomena.

(Sawday 1995: 64)

Andreas Vesalius and his contemporaries in the sixteenth century began to invert the humanist epistemological model by re-engaging with questions of truth and visibility. They advocated anatomical dissection not only as a key didactic tool within medicine but also as a means of gathering 'empirical verification of that anatomical knowledge that had been passed down from older writings; dissection was the only possible guide to the trustworthy description of the parts of the human body' (Carlino 1999: 1).

Aristotle's two key understandings of knowledge, techne and eputeme, began to be integrated within medical practice and training. With medicine now acknowledged as a manual art, the physician was expected to literally use his hands in the pursuit of diagnoses, cures and interrogation that could involve such work as the tactile examination of patients, the preparation of medicaments or dissection. £putemewas described by Aristotle as theoretical and scientific knowledge, 'capable of being taught, and its object of being learned' (Aristotle 1984: 1799). Such knowledge is trans­mittable as educative material through its being provable and therefore demonstrable to others. The new figure of the physician-anatomist

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undertook his own dissections, demonstrating and analysing the body through a combination of techne and eputeme, now considered equally valuable to the medic when practising the art of healing. His articulations over the body emerged not from textual readings but from his own practice in the moment of anatomizing. With the body conceived of as a text in its own right, to be read and interpreted, the technology of dissection could begin to unconceal truth and construct demonstrable knowledge in the anatomy theatre.

Heidegger's exploration of technology emerged from his own contemporary context and moment in the middle of the twentieth century, when technology was rapidly changing and evolving to become a dominant paradigm. He viewed it as a powerful and worrying phenomenon that already had the potential to manipulate and control through ordering lives and environments by technological means. His return to the Greek origins and meanings of certain terms seems to address a particular nostalgia for what he appears to conceive of as 'purer' engagements with technology that mate· rialized through mutual encounters with the physical world. Technewas respectful of the natural environment and its orders/disorders, whereas modern technology, for Heidegger, forces nature to bring forth its treasures, energies and surpluses in a manner that is both violent and exploitative. This contrasts with poiV.u, where things naturally come forth, such as blossom or the opening of a flower's petals: 'The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unrea· sonable demand' (Heidegger 1978: 320). He refers to the soil, which is challenged and forced to bring forth its stores of coal and ore, for instance, and the river that is dammed in order to generate electricity.

Medical technologies can be viewed as, following Foucault, forcing the body to relinquish its interior secrets, often violating its vulnerable exterior to access the inner organism. Heidegger's proposition of a

challenge to nature through technology sometimes becomes a moment of unwatchable violation, when the body is entered and viewed by instruments and machines. The moment of challenging the flesh by the scalpel, cleaving it in two, is the point at which dignity, integrity and sacredness are directly detached from the body. Once again, the tension that Heidegger locates in the movement of revelation and concealment is identifiable in this act of opening and intervention. The incision and its subsequent separations and partitions will eventually conceal the originary unity of the body as it is fragmented and dismembered, but what will be revealed through this brutal parti· tioning is new knowledge and understanding of that holistic figure.

The technological artefact or tool is commonly perceived as extending the human body, particu· larly the senses, by radically enhancing certain aspects of the body, making them more efficient or powerful. For instance, the microscope extends vision by magnifying its objects, and the spade utilizes our dexterity and strength but channels them in very specific ways so that digging is effective and productive. Inevitably, the tool demands some skill in its proficient use, or it will not operate at its most efficient level. Heidegger's philosophy of technology moves beyond this apparently simple com pre· hension of the tool as an extension of the human, to consider its essence as a mode of revelation and, at times, exploitation. The extension granted through technology is between self and environment: the self that wields the tool, and the object it contacts and manipulates beyond itself. In other words, the tool performs 'primary relationships between external things' by connecting them in some way- physically, visibly and so on (Rothenberg 1993: n). As an 'instrument of relations', technology links what is useful, productive and beneficial, to human needs and ends (n). In medicine, relationality through the scalpel or other surgical instrument is between interior and exterior, living and dead flesh, knowledge

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and ignorance that constantly play between visibility and concealment. Technology connects these elements of the anatomical scene by making such relations visible or, at the least, by bringing these states into contact with one another.

Theatrically, relationality occurs in multiple ways, as semiotic analysis can reveal through consideration of such elements as indexes and icons, but what about technology making manifest certain relations previously unseen within the theatrical frame? Theatrical tech­nologies, such as lighting and sound are, of course, capable of undertaking this task but more interestingly, I want to interrogate the potentials of utilizing certain medical technolo­gies in performance and the connections between philosophies of technology and these moments on stage, and to do this I am going to examine a particular scene in Sodetas Raffaello Sanzio's production of Giulio Ce..6are (2001}.

Here, medico-technology is used to reveal specific relations crucial to the theatre and foundational to Shakespeare's text of JuliU.-6 Cav.ar, upon which the performance is based. In a particular scene in the first act, the stage is taken to blackout and the actor, labelled as 'KS' on his flowing white robe, sits downstage right with a box-like object in front of him on the floor. The character's name is ' ... VSKIJ', and he appears to be a conflation of Konstantin Stanislavski and Christ. This doubleness is implied by his Christ-like appearance and Stanislavski's initials on his robe. In the blackout, the only light comes from an initially indiscernible source that the actor holds in his lap. It casts gentle shadows over the actor's body, and as he speaks he slowly lifts the light towards his face. He then shines it directly into his mouth, so that this round cavity radiates light before the illumination wavers and gradually disappears from view, the source travelling further back into the actor's throat. As the light fades, so a disc of light and movement appears on the back wall of the stage. It becomes

apparent that this disc of light is in fact the projection of a film of a journey through a dark, moist and initially unrecognizable tunnel whose sides are strangely animate and even violent, pushing against the camera, blocking its way and then allowing passage once more. At some point in this sequence, the spectator suddenly comprehends the relations here and can retro­spectively unravel what has been seen. The light is the tip of a length of fibre-optic cable which the actor has fed into his body, at which point the live relay of the optic's images are projected onto the cyclorama. What we have witnessed, for a while unwittingly, is the journey of the cable down the actor's trachea to a position in front of the vocal cords in the larynx.

Using this medical imaging technology, the audience sees the vocal cords of the actor, who is now almost completely invisible on the stage with only limited light spill from the fibre optic inside his body. As he speaks, the work of the vocal cords is revealed, operating through different intensities of muscular contraction that are sometimes gentle and sometimes wild. What technology makes manifest here is the relation between physiological activity in the larynx that is violent and extreme, the creation of sound through these muscular actions and its transformation into speech by the mouth, tongue, teeth and lips. In a play where speech is key to the narrative in terms of manipulating and persuading listeners, not only is the rhetorical work of language demonstrated in the actorly delivery of speech but technology is used to show the work of the body of the speaker in this process. The relation between the actor's body and the dramatic text, so prevalent a concern in theatre studies discourse, is here focused and magnified through technology that makes the connection explicitly physical, embodied and visible.

To put objects and materials into relational dynamics with each other in this way through technology is symptomatic of an intention or a will to do so. The tool, the instrument and the device must be controlled and directed towards

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its objects by the human operative that implies 'an idea to act, a thought that engages with the world, making the possible actual' (Rothenberg 1993: 14). Much philosophy of technology is concerned with this intentional movement outwards from the body and into the world through the mediation of the tool. This, I believe, explains the slight unease I felt at witnessing the actor inserting and manipulat­ing the fibre optic cable in Giulio Ce.Aare. The technological artefact moves outwards from the body but then doubles back on itself to invade its own origin, if you will. Tools wielded by an individual on his or her own body confounds this outward movement and becomes unnerving, even disturbing, in its self-direction . Technologies of medicine are largely invested in such penetrations and interventions in the human body that are socially acceptable when directed by a medical professional but considered as something radically other when used by an individual on their own body.

Heidegger claimed modern technology is rooted in intentionality that becomes exploita­tive and destructive of nature in the way that it is capable of forcing the world to bring forth its energies, raw materials and treasures. Such intention is trans formative, whether it is exploitative in this way or benign, because technology reaches outward in an 'exciting, swirling, thrilling continuum of activity' that engages with the world and is transformed by it (Rothenberg 1993: n). Arguably, it is not just the world that is transformed by its contact with technology. Don Idhe speculates that the experience of using technology is itself trans­formative and complex, outlining his contention through the simple example of writing with chalk on a blackboard. First, what can be felt in this action is the texture and substance of the blackboard through the chalk at the point where chalk meets surface (Idhe 1979: 7). This information is transmitted through the chalk, where the chalk becomes secondary to perception. Idhe suggests that this experience involves the instrument being reduced in

perception so that it is not encountered 'as either thematic or as an object' in this moment. Instead, the technological artefact becomes an extension of the self through having a 'partial transparency relation between myself and what is other'. What is felt is a transformed experience -it is not the same as touching the flesh or the blackboard directly: 'This trans­formation contains the possibilities ... of both a certain extension and amplification of experience and of a reduction and transform­ation of experience' (10).

Idhe defines such relations as 'embodiment relations', where technology has a partial trans­parency and becomes incorporated into our experience of the world (8). He goes on to elaborate still further by concentrating on the dental probe used to examine teeth. Once again, he notes the intention of the instrument is to feel the tooth, not the tool, and so one experiences the 'relative disappearance of the probe as such ... it withdraws' (19). So, even as the instrument extends our knowledge of the world, it is not fully within perception. In this position of partial transparency, the probe simultaneously amplifies features of the tooth beyond those available to direct tactile contact. The minutiae of the surface of the tooth can be experienced through the probe, but such ampli­fication is not without its concomitant reduction of other features. For instance, the dental probe cannot transfer information about temperature or moisture on the tooth's surface, which touch could:

With every amplification, there is a simultane­ous and necessary reduction. And within this structure, two effects may be noted: first, the amplification tends to stand out, to be dramatic, while the reduction tends to be overlooked ... The second effect is that the transformation alters ... the 'distance' of the phenomenon being experienced. The instrument mediated entity is one which ... appears with a different perspective, its micro-features are emphasized, and this is part of the transformation process itself.

(Idhe 1979: 21-2)

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Such an analysis deepens aspects of Heidegger's by examining the means by which technology functions and locates some intriguing tensions that incorporate his reveal­conceal dichotomy within them.

Although the spectator of the fibre-optic scene described previously cannot know what the actor experiences of this technology, its trans­formative potential in performance is dramatic. For the viewer, the technology becomes similarly transparent in its disappearance from the scene. Watching the live images from within the actor's throat, the actual workings and implications of this device are rendered irrelevant as the picture becomes fascinating and mesmeric. That the cable is within the body of the actor, held there by his own hand, where a free and unimpeded airway should be, is acknowledged only peripherally. The focus is on the vocal cords and their action, even to the extent that the actor himself begins to dissolve within perception. The larynx is amplified as much as the body, in which this anatomical structure lodges, is reduced- to the point that the projection stands in for the actor and his speech. As in dissection, part is exchanged for whole and becomes the object of interest, its power residing in its uncanniness as a revealed feature, one that we may know about but have probably never seen, especially not in its animate and vocal state. Speech is thus transformed by this revelatory technology into an embodied act, making visible what is interior, hidden and unconscious. In Heidegger's terms, the correspondence between text, body and speech is strikingly displayed by knowledge being explicitly demonstrated as truth in a phenomenological arena resonant with the anatomy theatre.

Amplification is of the invisible into the highly visible in this scene, with the fibre-optic cable and live projection magnifying the anatomy of the larynx to grand proportions that an entire theatre audience can see clearly. The labour of speech is likewise heightened and made dramatic by revealing the work of the

vocal cords, as they are brought into proximity by muscles acting on the thyroid cartilages in forcible contractions that seem to have a life of their own because of their isolated appearance from the rest of the body. This is indicative of the reduction process at work, whereby the magnification reduces a sense of the body and any controlling mechanism over these structures. Also reduced is the rest of the speech process, which involves the mouth and the face in articulating and expressing words.

The transformative potential of technology is also apparent in its transmutation of the theatrical scene and meaning-construction within it. As noted above, the actor and the technology become transparent in this moment as the technology establishes new relations and brings them forth into visibility. Disembodied anatomical attributes stand in for the actor whilst embodying the speech act that is at the centre of the text. The interior of the body is made to convey meaning and significance in a manner that highlights director Romeo Castellucci's concern with connections between Stanislavski and the realist mode of acting that his system sought to exemplify. Through this ' ... VSKIJ' character, Castellucci undermines Stanislavski's aims of unifying the psychical and the physical by focusing entirely on the inner, organic operations of the body. Stanislavski's focus on memory, imagination and emotional recall are denied embodiment as the exterior of the actor's body disappears from perception. Where thought is supposedly made manifest on the stage of Stanislavski, in speech, gesture, expression and movement Castellucci presents us with organic, biological 'life' as the creator of meaning- the intricate and unconscious physic logical processes of being an animate and discursive subject.

As we have noted, the technology of dissection can be viewed as a double-edged sword, which provides understanding but in the same incision partitions the body irretrievably and mercilessly. Certain tools and instruments

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appear to be the bearers of these horrors,

imprinted with their potential to violate the body and the damage they can inflict on unprotected flesh. They are deeply resonant with the pain that recognizes the trans formative power of technology in negative ways. A recent exhibition at the Science Museum, London,

bears witness to this technological phobia and comprehension of its destructive, trans forma­

tive potential. Pain: PaAL:.ion, CompaAL:.ion, Seruibility displayed various instruments of torture alongside medical and dental implements, silently acknowledging their

comparable power to connect pain, domination and truth.1 What is revealed with these tools is the interior, which is forced to emerge into the exterior in brutal and potentially fatal ways and makes explicit Elaine Scarry's contention that 'the weapon and the tool seem at moments indistinguishable, for they may each reside in a

single physical object ... and may be quickly transformed back and forth, now into one, now

into the other' (Scarry 1985: 173). This is perhaps what Kira O'Reilly highlights

in her most recent piece 'Untitled Action for the Arches' (NRLA 2005). In this work, the spectator

gets to spend time alone with O'Reilly in an intimate environment, where she then offers her body to be cut by the spectator and marked. One is free to incise her flesh whenever and wherever one pleases, but in reality few people actually seem to take her up on the offer, preferring instead to sit with O'Reilly and take pleasure from this proximity to the performer. Whereas in her other performance pieces, O'Reilly inflicts her own wounds or has a 'technician' undertake the task, the audience

member is here presented with the possibility of using technology to open O'Reilly's passive body, revealing the slippage between weapon

and tool that is dependent upon context and intention. Technological exploitation is resisted by those who choose not to intervene in this body, and Heidegger's notion of 'bringing-forth' is problematized by the desires of the spectator who avoid harming O'Reilly.

In order to comprehend this relation a little further, it is useful to consider the work of Michel de Certeau on the 'Scriptural Economy',

where he argues for a direct relation between the body and writing through the power of inscription manifest in the law of social organization: 'There is no law that is not

inscribed on bodies. Every law has a hold on the body ... From birth to mourning after death, law "takes hold of" bodies in order to make them

its text' (de Certeau 1984: 139). The connection here with the technological artefact is through the presence of the pen, as a tool, that transforms language into material, graphic

signs. De Certeau traces a historical desire to then 'place the (social and/or individual) body under the law of writing' that means that bodies are constantly 'defined, delimited, and

articulated by what writes' them (139). This not only is a symbolic activity, confined to books

and paper, but also suggests an explicitly carnal relation between the law, tools and the body,

where certain tools have been developed in order to write on the flesh, such as handcuffs, the whip and the truncheon. He detects in these kinds of

penal instruments a certain stability of form and design through time, but which remain forever capable of outlining 'the movements of a

suspended justice and already mold the parts of the body that are to be branded but are still absent' (141). From ancient torture instruments, to contemporary versions, it is possible always to identify the ways the body will be 'written' upon

by these implements of social law.

Connections between the law and this kind of direct inscription on the body of its rules and obligations are writ large in the anatomical theatre of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries discussed here, as dissection was part of a

system of penal punishment for the most heinous crimes. Acquisition of the body by the anatomists was a highly organized and regulated procedure that involved academic, civic and religious authorities working coopera­tively. The whole process of capital punishment was circumscribed by the law, and the

1 Pain: PCLMion. CompCLMion, Seruibility­a Well come Trust exhibition at the Science Museum, London, 1~ February-2o June 2004. curated by Javier Moscoso <www.wellcome. ac.uk /pain>

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dissection was an act that continued any punishment beyond death, marking the body ignominiously and irrecoverably. The instruments and technologies involved in this penal procedure are themselves somewhat transformed and problematized by two conflicting paradigms operating on the criminal body. De Certeau elaborates a relation between the law and the inscription of its parameters on the body in judicial circumstances that then become heightened but simultaneously altered by the scene of dissection. The instruments play between weapons and tools, as Scarry suggests, as the punishment is said to continue but the body becomes the site of explicit knowledge. Technological revelation is twofold- it reveals the utter destruction of the cadaver as the ulti­mate carnal punishment and the demonstration of the corporeal interior for didactic purposes.

I would want to suggest, finally, that the tool is capable of more than this mediation between the law and the body, and that the potential of transformation in its function, through techne, is resonant with theatrical questions of illusion and, perhaps, animation. Animation involves the giving of life to something or making it appear vital and spirited. In the anatomy theatre, the demonstration persuades its audience through animating various parts of the body in a pretence of life - limbs, ligaments, muscles and so on are manipulated by the anatomist to show their living operations and physiological linkages. Arguably, this situation is replicated in the realist theatrical space where objects, texts and bodies are revitalized in order to create an illusion of reality and suspend disbelief in the spectator. 'Truth' in both events is a constructed reality that depends upon certain tropes and devices that incorporate technology in their manipulations. Following Heidegger, these technologies can amplify, extend, reveal and exploit bodies on stage and the images created there, while simultaneously concealing, reducing and obscuring others.

Culturally, there appears to be a developing fascination with the medicalized revelation of

the interior of the human body. This includes a plethora of television programmes, both fictional and documentary, and various exhibitions, such as Spectacular Bodie-A at the Hayward Gallery, London, and the internation­ally touring show, BodyworldA, which presents preserved, anatomized cadavers to the general public. Simultaneously, projects that seek to cross disciplinary boundaries between art and science, including theatre and science, have been emerging. The most recent of these is the Body State-A project, launched by the University of Warwick, which seeks to establish research links between theatre and the history of medi­cine. The so-called 'Pilot Project', held on 11 June 2005, consisted of a number of performances by artists who explicitly explore the medicalized body in their practice. It is within the context of this work that this essay is situated.

REFERENCES

Aristotle (1984) 'Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI' in The Complete Work.o of Arutotle: Vol.1, ed. ). Barnes, New jersey: Princeton University Press.

Carlino, A. (1999) Book.o of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renai.Mance Learning, trans.). Tedeschi and A. C. Tedeschi, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.

Heidegger, M. (1978) 'The Question Concerning Technology' in BaAic Writing1>: Martin Heidegger, ed. D. Farrell Krell, London: Routledge.

Idhe, D. (1979) Technic1> and Praxu, Dordrecht and London: D. Reidel Publishing Company.

Pouchelle, M. C. (1990) The Body and Surgery in the Middle AgeL>, trans. R. Morris, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Rothenberg, D. (1993) Hand'.!, End: Technology and the Limitl> of Nature, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sawday. ). (1995) The Body Emblazoned: Di.Mection and the Human Body in Renai.Mance Culture, London: Routledge.

Scarry, E. (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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