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Abstract
The essay proposes a critique of a dominant model for structuring perception based on a fixed point of vision and stemming from Renaissance perspective, which grounds a sociality based on categorical splits. The essay proposes a new theory of movement and perception grounded on proprioception (the internal sense of movement of the body) linked to a new field-theory of movement. Finally, the essay proposes techniques and improvization practices to enact modes of relation and sociality grounded on this new account of movement and perception, associated to a co-sensing ethics proposing a series of meta-species, mestiza, neurodiverse, microsexual and swarming becomings.
Notes
1 A 1 followed by 100 zeros, based on which is the name of the company Google. On the combinatory of joints see Bowman (Citation2017, p. 60).
2 A googol to the power of googol, a number with more zeros than atoms in the universe. This is not meant as a positivitic claim, but as a metaphoric approach to the infinite capacity for variation of a human body.
3 Biologist Lynn Margulis is the major exponent of a theory of serial endosymbiosis, or a continued process of symbiosis and symbiogenesis, and of bacterial sexual experimentation, or hypersex, grounding gene exchange and ongoing mutation, which are both interrelated and core to evolution (Margulis & Sagan, Citation1990, Citation1997).
4 However Judith Butler's and Jacques Derrida's politics of performativity is still valuable as one particular movement within discursive alignments.
5 “Becoming-with” (Haraway, Citation2008) is Donna Haraway's reply to Deleuze and Guattari's “becomings” (Deleuze & Guattari, Citation1987). While the latter propose becomings as movements of complete deterritorialization, as in becoming animal, Haraway critizises their despise of companion species and claims the relational aspect of becoming and the need to claim any vulnerable category. Becoming is in turn one of the oldest and most fundamental philosophical concepts, present in all presocratic philosophy of which Heraclitus presents one of the most radical and best known doctrines, where becoming is a never-ending process of emergence whose logos and identity is the ongoing tension between opposites, a process not aiming to a teleology: the latter was brought in later by Aristotle, dominating Western thinking ever since.
6 I have developed the theory of the Algoricene or Age of Algorithms in numerous essays and research projects (Val, Citation2017g, Citation2017h, Citation2018), as age where movements-perceptions, individual and social bodies and architectures become increasingly geometric and algorithmic, starting before ancient Greece with gridded textiles or cities and expanding exponentially in digital culture.
7 I am building here upon embodied cognitive science and taking it beyond its usual ontological boundaries.
8 See Bowman (Citation2017) on how movement changes gene expressions.
9 In reference to Foucault's account of sovereign societies (ancient societies distributing life and death) and disciplinary societies (from the XVIIth century, optimizing the performance of life in relation to Industrial Society) and to Deleuze’s (Citation1992) account of a society of control (flexible and dynamic feedback systems able to capitalize novelty, sine cybernetics and WWII).
10 I resonate and try to take further some of Bergson’s (Citation1944) theories, in particular in relation to movement and perception.
11 See Malabou (Citation2008, p. 12) and Hayles (Citation2012, p. 12).
12 Quantum field theory proposes vaccum fluctuations as constituting not only most of the mass of atoms but also as fundamental state of vaccum, and as source for the fundamental fields of nature and for the universe's history. See for instance Barad (Citation2012, p. 17) on Quantum Field Theory and the ontological indeterminacy at the core of matter.
13 I suggest that every imperial social organization is underlied by a different type of geometric or more general reductive organization of movement. For instance in China grids or engraving existed at the same time or even before they did in Europe but they didn't become source of a full-scale and all-encompassing system of rationalisation, as they did in Europe, grounding what is arguably the most succesfull and pervasive system of domination, while also controvertially associated to the history of democracy, as well as of slave societies.
14 For a full genealogy of the grid see Peggy Reynolds (Citationforthcoming).
15 Intra-action, following Karen Barad, is “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (Barad, Citation2007, p. 33).
16 His De Motu Animalium points though in the direction of proprioception.
17 In its ancient etymology, as in Hesiod's Theogony, Chaos is a yawning cave or abyss: an opening (Jaeger, Citation1947, p. 13; Thomson, Citation1954, p. 151).
18 Rephrasing of Barad (Citation2012, p. 12): “There are an infinite number of im/possibilities, but not everything is possible.”
19 See Bergson's Creative Evolution (Citation1944) on the Open and the Whole. I define movement fields as the consistency of the open, as Open Wholes.
20 Differing here from chakra theories that define universal energetics of the body.
21 The clinamen is a concept from Epicurean atomism appearing in verse 292 of the second book of Lucretius' De Rerum Naturam that speaks about the infinitesimal deviations of atoms from their trajectories accounting for how novelty and free will come about in the world.
22 Metaformance is a neologism put forward by Claudia Giannetti (Citation1997) since 1994 to describe the characteristics proper to the interface as predominant trope in media culture, foregrounding relationality, indeterminacy, feedback or recursivity, a collapse or redefinition of traditional splits between observer, work, author and process, and the absence of an external viewer. I retheorise it as aesthetics focusing on the infrastructure of perception rather than its content, and as possibility to bring about more plastic perceptions, where multisensory integration and reconfiguratuions of the proprioceptive field are more emergent and open.
23 The ecstastic and nomadic group of dancing and singing bodies from which, following Nietzsche and others after him, Greek Tragedy arose, linked to the Dyonisian Mysteries, a religion of the oppressed and of reunification with Nature.
24 The TS is a controversial theory defended by powerful technology company leaders like Ray Kurzweil, about the expected emergence of a strong AI, far superior to biological intelligence, around 2045.
25 Performativity in language is the power of certain speech acts to produce what they say, as in a court’s pronouncement of a sentence. But through Derrida and Butler, the power of performativity is defined in relation to decontextualising existing acts or norms, subverting them, as in the term queer, originally an insult, that gets subverted when appropriated in the first person.
26 See Gebser (Citation1985) on pre-perspectival, perspectival and a-perspectival cultures.
27 Microsexes is both a project ad a concept I develop since around 2007 (see www.microsex.org), resonating with Deleuze and Guattari's “tiny thousand sexes” but bringing them into a level of proprioception and an amorphous account of the body and perception, a post-anatomical body (Val, Citation2009, Citation2016) that is linked to bacterial sex and the orgy in evolution, since our tissues and proprioception are expression of it.
28 Of course, one should ask whether someone who passes for educated European white man, enjoying largely the privileges of the hegemonic subject, is at all entitled to speak bout decolonization, ratialization, neurodiversity and so on. Is the quest for a becoming amorphous only the phantasy of a hegemonic subject who can already enjoy visibility? Or can we move beyond the visible/invisible dichotomy of power struggles into a more creative sense of indeterminacy as not simply being invisible or visible? Can we understand the imperative for visibility as also a kind of violence, and create conditions for worlds that are grounded on radically different perceptual paradigms? Can we create a culture and science of movement from within, a proprioceptive culture-science not grounded on external points of vision?
29 A system for scoring citizens following behavioral traits derived largely from Big Data and surveillance systems currently being put in practice in China and which will define the access of citizens to services and their overall classification.