The only truly alien planet is Earth. - UniCA Eprints - Università degli ...

Insomma, la “società dello spettacolo” di Debord, in stretta connessione con la cultura del
simulacro 490 .
Stelarc appartiene all’ordine della simulazione individuato da Baudrillard. Il cyborg è un
simulacro high-tech: è «un organismo cibernetico, protesizzatosi nell’informazione, che, come
sostiene Stelarc, integra un corpo biologico ormai funzionalmente obsoleto” 491 . Abbiamo visto
come in Ballard ogni tanto la figura del cyborg faccia un’apparizione, come per esempio nel
personaggio di Gabrielle in Crash. Sul sito internet di Stelarc si può leggere la seguente
dichiarazione su corpo e tecnologia:
Bodies are both Zombies and Cyborgs. We have never had a mind of our own and we often perform
involuntarily conditioned and externally prompted. Ever since we evolved as hominids and developed
bipedal locomotion, two limbs became manipulators and we constructed artifacts, instruments and machines.
In other words we have always been coupled with technology. We have always been prosthetic bodies. We
fear the involuntary and we are becoming increasingly automated and extended. But we fear what we have
always been and what we have already become - Zombies and Cyborgs 492 .
Nell’accostare simulazione e fantasia Foster cita Platone e Deleuze. Il primo distingueva le
immagini in copie conformi all’idea e copie infedeli, simulacri fantasmatici cattivi. Il secondo
commenta che la tradizione platonica non si limita a respingere il simulacro in quanto brutta copia
priva di un originale, ma perché mette in discussione il rapporto tra originale e copia, la gerarchia
tra l’idea e la sua rappresentazione 493 .
490 «[W]hat the architecture historians call ‘historicism’, namely, the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past,
the play of random stylistic allusion, and in general what Henri Lefebvre has called the increasing primacy of the ‘neo’.
This omnipresence of pastiche is not incompatible with a certain humor, however, nor is it innocent of all passion: it is
at the least compatible with addiction – with a whole historically original consumers’ appetite for a world transformed
into sheer images of itself and for pseudo-events and ‘spectacles’ (the term of the situationists). It is for such objects
that we may reserve Plato’s conception of the ‘simulacrum’, the identical copy for which no original has ever existed.
Appropriately enough, the culture of the simulacrum comes to life in a society where exchange value has been
generalized to the point at which the very memory of use value is effaced, a society of which Guy Debord has observed,
in an extraordinary phrase, that in it “the image has become the final form of commodity reification” (The society of the
spectacle).» F. Jameson, op. cit., p. 18.
491 E. L. Francalanci, op. cit. Stelarc è un performer multimediale nato a Cipro nel 1946 e naturalizzato australiano. La
sua performance più famosa consisteva nella sospensione del suo corpo a sistemi di uncini conficcati nella carne,
replicata per 25 volte tra il 1976 e il 1988. Ma è noto soprattutto per aver trasformato il proprio corpo in un cyborg vero
e proprio con degli innesti tecnologici, quali una terza mano sintetica e un braccio virtuale.
492 Stelarc (http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/arcx.html) [Ultima visita 04/10/2010].
493 «But what does simulation have to do with fantasy? Both can confound origins, and both are repressed within
modernism for doing so. It is in the despised realm of fantasy that our aesthetic tradition long imprisoned simulation –
that is, until its partial release in surrealism. For Plato, images were divided between proper claimants and false
claimants to the idea, between good iconic copies that resemble the idea and bad fantasmatic simulacra that insinuate it.
As Gilles Deleuze has argued, the platonic tradition repressed the simulacrum not simply as a false claimant, a bad copy
without an original, but because it challenged the order of original and copy, the hierarchy of idea and representation –
the principle of identity, we might say after Ernst. In repression the fantasmatic simulacrum assumed a daemonic
quality as well, and Deleuze describes it in terms similar to our ‘uncanny’ definition of surrealist fantasy: ‘The
simulacrum implies great dimensions, depths, and distances which the observer cannot dominate. It is because he
cannot master them that he has an impression of resemblance. The simulacrum includes within itself the differential
point of view, and the spectator is made part of the simulacrum, which is transformed and deformed according to his
point of view. In short, folded within the simulacrum there is a process of going mad, a process of limitlessness’
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