The article addresses the issues of vegetal subjectivity, sexuality and corporeality in the context of soviet postanthropocentrism and critical posthumanism. The narrative focuses on the figure of hogweed which in Soviet times was designed to rebalance the post-war economy on a par with humans, but today has become an embodiment of trauma, a toxic monster to be destroyed. Referring to the negative consequences of soviet postanthropocentrism, flourished in the 1920s, in particular to the notion of political interpellation of the non-human and dehumanization of the human, the author considers today’s ferality of post-soviet territories as a special form of the sympoetic co-existence. Such kind of sympoesis of humans, animals, plants and other species connected by diff erent economic, political and biological relationships implies the question about the need for affirmative biopolitics (Roberto Esposito) which accepts life in all its strange and unusual for the human eye manifestations. Similarly, the hogweed—an alien that burst from the non-ecological zone and violated the harmonious order of fl ora and fauna—represents an inverted ecocriticism that refers to the dark side of ecology and there, on the dark side, searches for sources of harmonization. The hogweed entails environmental thought, and is monstrously affirmative. 

The article is an introduction that examines certain perspectives of new-materialist research on the ontological status of alternative universes in bio art projects with reference to the narratological concepts of possible worlds and the storyworld. In this context, it introduces the concept of “strongly possible worlds”, which is a complementary concept to the Jan Alber’s theory of impossible worlds. This methodological proposal is also presented in the article in reference to the latest study by Francesca Ferrando, in which the idea of “posthuman multiverse” was presented. 

The author also considers the role of non-human actors in the process of constructing such “in the world stories” (Bruno Latour). As non-human actors bacteria and living cells are understood, which have their own intentionality (goal-oriented behavior) and which are responsible for causal changes to the project; moreover, non-human actors are considered to be a force that aff ects the physical shape of storyworlds—with reference to Timothy Morton’s category of hyperobjects.

The article presents two types of experiments involving the process of creation of possible worlds in bio art. The fi rst one is conducted by the artists working with living materials, mostly tissues and cells, as the duo Tissue Culture and Art Project, Alicia King and Guy Ben-Ary and Kirsten Hudson; the other one is so called bacterial art with Sonja Bäumel’s “Expanded body”, Pinar Yoldas “Speculative biologies” and “Ecosystem of Excess”, as well as Anna Dumitriu’s artistic vision “The Romantic Disease: An Artistic Investigation of Tuberculosis” and “ArchaeaBot: A Post Climate Change, Post Singularity Life-form” as special case studies. 

Along with the development of technology undermining the traditional notion of humanity in Judeo-Christianity, a variety of debates on beyond-human phenomena have emerged since the late 20th century. However, without waiting for these debates, outside of the West, similar phenomena have occurred even before the late 20th century. This paper will explore the non-representational forces of human-technology relations in Japan, focusing on the transition of the technological environment from the 1960s to the 1990s. An aff ective continuum between humans and natural or artifi cial things, including modern technology in the 1960s, was formed through material interfaces.  However, in the 1990s, when electronic technology began to be used to control sensory signals in detail, the equilibrium of representational and non-representational forces became unstable. The paper illustrates an alternate type of humanity-centered limitation which would help to relativize the dominant Western context. 

The human body schema is subjugated to utilitarian modes of being and colonised by hegemonistic, culturally limited, body paradigms. Could there be strategies for redesigning the body which do not depend on technological interference? In contrast to a humanist ideal of teleological rationality and perfectibility, and to the transhumanist concern with enhancement through technology, I suggest that the site for the posthuman is the diverse body itself; and that this posthuman body is an ongoing investigation.

Abstract art allows for complexity and pluralism in the body; there is a shift from the body being the subject of the work to the body as a site of sensory experience. Similarly, experimental dance practices promote a somatosensory reorganisation, enabling access to corporeal spaces and ways of inhabiting the body which break with cultural conditioning and preconceived limits of anatomy. These two practices share a heuristic, phenomenological approach that foregrounds a perpetual transforming and kinaesthetically active body in exchange with its surroundings. The borders of the body, and the scale of our relationship to our body, shift.

I propose that a posthumanism which gives attention to the dormant minutiae of the body can give us our bodies back. Through abstraction the ontological space of the body becomes, a kinaesthetic, active site: liminal and unfolding. Instead of a trajectory of progress there is an unearthing of dormant minutiae and a perpetual, delicate dance in a constellation of relations.

The mass public protests against introduction of further limitations on women’s reproductive rights in 2016 become important moment for the Polish feminist movement. Yet, the movement’s structure and semiotic reservoir of justifi cations has visibly changed in the recent years. The young Polish feminism has become more “girlish” than “womanly”. In our paper, we analyze how the “girlhood” artistic practices fi t into the renewal of contemporary refl ection on the gender roles of women and the Polish feminist movement. We analyzed practices of young Polish artivists, involved in girlhood-feminist collectives, and compared their cultural tactics with those of selfi e feminism. The paper focuses on girlhood practices as activities which take place across the individual and collective divide and redefi ne the public sphere. Demonstrating how these initiatives negotiate the normative cultural system, we present expressions of the girlhood experience and describe its social and structural conditions. We analyze feminist artistic practices as expressible and language-based feminine emancipatory practices, using tools typical of analysis of discourse and, predominantly, linguistic performance.

The computer is not a tool to help us do whatever we do, it is what we do, it is the medium on which we work

Dene Grigar in conversation with Piotr Marecki

Transcribed and edited by Martyna Chmielińska

Francesca Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., London 2019, pp. 272.