Imagining Impossible Subjectivities

Abstract

This research portfolio begins as a political inspection into the conditions of the Posthuman. Probing materialities belonging to somewhere other than here, it molds forms within their limits, and carrying them back, grants presence to future ontologies. Targeting the impasse of the Human in its current state this portfolio “brings back” new images of life to offer “ways out” from within. Imagining Impossible Subjectivities models a type of image production made through a furtive union of reason and romance, where outcomes function in aim of engineering new life. The portfolio both enacts this mode of image making and proposes a system for practitioners and critical culture. The images produced in this portfolio are the methodological outcomes of freedoms found inside present constraints, explaining and testing a set of reasons that afford fictive and romantic images. Theory and philosophy establish logical constraints within which imaging and imagining take place, as each chapter constructs a logical ground only to quickly take flight to the heights of fiction. A range of speculative philosophies establish the scene for departure into a place where unknowable forms of ourselves exist. Emerging through ideas of self-construction and self-revision a Human system of continuous adaptation is borne in Complexity. In the space once occupied by essence, a biological, plastic, and resistant subject is afforded form through the theories of Neuroplasticity and Epigenetics in Plasticity. Finally, in Contingency, on the grounds of anticorrelationism, the Human is sacrificed to the “outside”. Imagining Impossible Subjectivities starts from the position that we are not currently living at all. Setting out to find new materials and forms for life, it finds them in the future and activates them in the present. Logical descriptions of new ontologies finish in the bloom of fiction. Finishing at a height of romantic abstraction, this portfolio takes the form of future difference.