The presentation will address the different approaches proposed by streams of Transhumanism, ciritcal Posthumanism and the more recent of Metahumanism. I will try to show the critical differences arising between transhumanist and posthumanist conceptions, whereby posthumanism is understood as a critique of humanism's foundational premises and a present condition in information society, whereas transhumanism sees the posthuman as a utopian future for humanity, along conceptions of enhancement of the species which, through lacking a consistent critique of the concept of "good", is reinstating humanistic conceptions and further exposing them to the positivism of capitalist regimes.

 

I will furthermore expose the need to go beyond traditional discourses of critical posthumanism, founded on materialist conceptions of the body, and of deepening into the understanding of the world as relational process and of the body as affect, subject to intensive regulations in contemprary capitalism. This outlines the starting point for Metahumanism, a new thread inagurated by myself in collaboration with Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, and first presented in the Audivisual Posthumanism conference in 2010 in Lesvos, Greece.

 

Metahumanism not only deepenes the view of the world as relational complex but also avows for modes of relational ecology, aesthetics and political strategy, that do not rely upon the narratives and the perspectives of the human and the posthuman. Embracing perspectivism it also goes beyond it by introducing the need for a new immanentism that is expressed in figures and processes such as the post-anatomical body, the metabody, metasexuality, metaformance, metamedia and amorphogenesis. These rely for their understanding upon specific practices in the realm of media arts, performance and technology production, exmples of which will be given at the presentation.

 

 

 

Microsexes/Microdances - Metahuman Technologies: Undoing anatomy in capitalism of affects

How we experience and understand the body is the result of technologies of
perception like the camera-secreen-stage, which have hithero reproduced a
cartesian split between object-subject, body-mind, constituting the abstract
rational subject as exterior to a material body. We can reappropriate these
technologies in order to transform perception, proprioception and embodied
experience towards a relational model based not on exteriority but on
immanence.

This is especially urgent in current capitalism which disseminates standard
affects in the bodies-subjects through global choreographies distribued
through interfaces, moving images or music: the Panchoreographic. Which are
the contagious choreographies that reproduce standard affects and perpetuate
hegemonic regimes in western pseudo democracies?

On the other hand western dance traditions are mostly embedded in the
spectacular-cartesian dualistic paradigm which requires the abstract entity
of the subject-dancer, the subject-choregrapher and the subject-spectator,
all seemingly exterior to "the body". What happens if we dissolve the
perceptual boundaries that constitute these arbitrary constructs? What kind
of relational body may we set to motion that defies both disciplinary grids
and control technologies of affective capitalism?

Microsexes is such an attempt, a project in which, by disseminating the
organs of vision in the whole skin (through surveillance cameras placed
anywhere on the body), operates on the conditions of possibility of
perception and propioception to induce a productive disorientation, an
"otherception", a body that doesn't see itself from an outside, that has no
fixed form or anatomy, defies discursive normative boundaries, explodes in
infinite potential microsexes in permament amorphogenesis.

Microsexes/Microdances are antiviruses against the viruses of global
choreohraphic contagion of affective capitalism.

Such attempts are techno-aesthetic and political strategies towards a new
kind of relational body, a "common body" that does not rely on the dualistic
control paradigms inherited from the humanistic tradition: metahuman
techologies for a "moving in between", productive deterritorialisations and
resistances in which new potential affects may emerge that may remain in the
realm of the nameless and amorphous while they operate on the boundaries of
form.