The reasons for such festive inclinations are numerous but the most important one is that of the need to emphasise the process, the flux, the instability as inherently natural and human.  This way she avoids positioning herself as an opponent of humanism as abandoning binary dichotomies and blurring the boundaries might establish, in her view, a  rich breeding ground, where transformation is born, which echoes the rhizome proposal of Deleuze and Guattari.

What Shildrick also stresses in her paper is the promise embodied in the liquidity, not the threat. While reading about the uncanny digital technologies last year I was not sure if the fragmentation caused by the multiplying online traces of my digital escapades and practices are something worth seeking after. I felt simultaneously attracted and threatened by the prospect, thrilled by the enhanced modes of being and feeling but alarmed by the possibility of losing sanity, succumbing to the power of my avatars, becoming dehumanised, the everlasting friction between the technoutopia and dystopia, a view still entrenched in ‘either … or’ perception of the world and subjectivity, based on binarism and thus on exclusion. The exclusion can never be complete according to Shildrick as the boundaries are liquid and permeable, allowing multiple incorporations which are at the forefront when it comes to innovation, creativity and imagination and so opening up different world, modes of being and becoming. This is a richer reality, enlarging not restricting  human subjectivity, embodying it and not disembodying.

While researching monstrous bodies I came across digital manipulations of the human body in art, crossing the boundaries between the human and machinic, between the disabled and the healthy. One of the projects struck me in particular. In the process of digital imagining the basic senes of smell, sight, taste and hearing got overgrown with thick layers of skin (thus excluded), giving an overall grim and dystopic look to the technological face, this way probably emphasising the desensitising threats. I would argue that this could be indeed the case if we persist identifying and maintaining the boundaries sealed.

The eyeless body might appear anti-human but uncannily by liquidising some of the senses and leaving one, the skin a very sensitive organ, it fosters new receptiveness.

***

Among different threats related to the globally rising prevalence of digital technologies, Hand lists ‘liquefaction’ of traditional institutions and practices. The humanistic stability of the self could also be subject to this process. Bauman (2000) pointed at  uncertainty as pervasive characteristics of liquid modernity. He illustrates this further by referring to notions of chaos, fluidity and ambivalence and describes a liquid modern man as a nomad or a tourist, responsible for weaving his life himself. Being in  perpetual motion and executing the freedom of one’s own making have become a mode of being.

The collapse of stability and the never-ending changes a human undergoes through the course of their life seem to be at the forefront of posthumanism (based only on preliminary reading), which also conceives the posthuman as an ‘emergent ontology’, thus emphasising the importance of becoming, hosting multiple identities and perceiving the world from a number of perspectives.

Again rapid digitisation and the transformation of culture into digital culture is possibly instrumental in this process of posthumanisation of a human(Hand 2008) or even their cyborgisation.

Is this liquefaction liberating or threatening in regard to our agency and the choices we make, our free will? If none of the universal truths can be trusted any more in the times of supercomplexity and if reality is to be observed through a number of perspectives, perhaps the notions of agency and ‘free will’ lose their validity, especially when multiple identities are at stake? It appears a whole new mindset is needed …

Liquid Man

Pic by Chris Wardle-Cousins.