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Themesicon: navigation pathCyborg Bodiesicon: navigation pathPostsexual Bodies
 
Empyrean (Rackham, Melinda)
 
 
 

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«subjectivation,» describes «lines of flight within the subject.» However, these have little to do with a subject—rather it is a question of an «individuation operating by intensities, within individual fields not within persons or identities.» [31]

The attempts to define the ‹agents› in the Net in theory and in practice as ‹a-persons› can also be read against this background. Cells, bacteria, viruses and other morphologically indefinite figurations therefore often share the digital planet. After Sadie Plant first defined women as the best inhabitants of the Net, in a second step she came to the conclusion that a digital culture cannot, however, presume a familiar form. Rather the active authorities must be thought of as something that causes «complex interactions of media, organisms, weather patterns, ecosystems, thought patterns, cities, discourses, fashions, populations, brains, markets, dance nights and bacterial exchanges [to] emerge. […] You live in cultures, and cultures live in you. […] Without the centrality of agency, culture is neither high, nor ordinary, but complex.» [32] The Australian media artist Melinda Rackham develops these kinds of living things, by means of which she attempts

 

to convert them into movements, migrations, transferences, affections, states of love, viral symbioses and transformations of all kinds: pulsating, glowing, starfish-like creations, a glittering and flickering as in a fluorescent aquarium. To cite only a couple of her works: The multi-user project «empyrean» depicts a parallel universe, an arena beyond space and time, the hungry emptiness following potentialities, a world of breaks and intervals in which we operate as avatars. In contrast, the work «carrier» visualizes a symbiotic ecology that is produced through the love affair between the user and the hepatitis C virus. [33]

This digital configuration does not, however, only receive support from the cyberfeminist side. Representatives of a ‹posthuman› direction of thought also favor the amorphic state as the expression of a posthuman stage of development. This differs in many respects from the modern version of humans, in particular with regard to language and sexual difference and its associated desire. While the psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan, a classic representative of modernity, speaks of «floating signifiers,» according to the American literary scholar N. Katherine Hayles

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