METABODY – concept

METABODY is a central concept of Jaym* del Val’s Radical Movement Philosophy, which Jaym* has developed since hir first essay in 2002 (see references below).

Metabody is an all-encompassing metaconcept/movement of thought, to rethink all of reality as movement, a movement that must be understood as fields, fields of movement relations, fields of fluctuation in variation, therefore always corporeal. Everything in the cosmos can be rethought like this, from a tornado to an organism, a swarm or a society. The prefix meta- in classical Greek has at least a double connotation: relational and intermediate, and what goes beyond, is in variation or becoming. Metabody is therefore a key concept in Jaym* del Val’s proposal to recover a vital sense of symbiosis and mutation. Each individual body can be reconceptualized as a metabody, a multiple field of relations. Each animal body is itself a metabody: a swarm (of joints, or molecules) and is part of other larger metabodies-swarms (social and planetary). Rethinking ourselves as metabodies invites us to think about the complex fields of relationships of which we are a part, many of them of a planetary order, and their degrees of openness: from bacterial metabodies that underlie 4 billion years of evolution and biodiversity, to algorithmic metabodies that have created a mass extinction in the last 4,000 years.

The Metabody can be thought of and activated through the trope of the swarm and also the chorus (as a group of bodies that dance and sing, as a group dance and as a space for dance, in its ancient Greek meaning): the chorus rethought as an open collective, the consistency of the heterogeneous and mutant, of the self-organising, in the complete absence of a control center and where everything is always in variation (echoing Lucretius’ concept of the clinamen). Metabody expands the Nietzschean idea that “we are body and nothing else” and the misnamed “mind” is a small part of the body: all thought is embodied, it is movement. The Metabody is linked to an expanded theory of proprioception as the primordial sense of movement of the body, of one’s own body and of symbiosis and variation with the world, associated with BI, Body Intelligence: every metabody has its BI, as a capacity for symbiotic variation with the world. Finally, Metabody is equivalent to Common Body, another concept proposed by Jaime since 2009 to think about the relationships of movement that constitute not only the social and life, but also the “individual” and the “I” as fields of relationships, of open consistency, vindicating the essential role of indeterminacy for life, as the basis of a relational ontology, and the dynamics of the open-plural.

The Metabody concept is therefore central to both an onto-epistemology and an ethico-eco-aesthetico-politics, linked to the movement practices that Jaym* has been developing since at least 2010. In particular, Metabody, is the name of a multi-year European project with 13 partners from six countries coordinated by Jaime from 2013 to 2016 and which continues today as the Metabody Forum, as well as the Metabody Institute and the Metabody-Reverso Center, currently evolving through the new Bodynet-Khorós project , also focused on the so-called “metabody techniques”, and which, in addition to continuing a line of critical reinvention of our relationship with digital technologies of social control, is focused on reinventing and recovering choral and vital dances, and body technics /afer Marcel Mauss): that which a body can do with its movement and perception.

The metabody is a central concept of what Jaym*calls Ontohacking: hacking our understanding of the “real” and of any given concept, starting to see all entities or structures as fields of relational movement. It is for this reason an ecology and ethics of co-sensing and sensorimotor plasticity, associated with the practice of metaformance as a pragmatic of anti-spectacular movement dedicated to creating metabodies, immanent but open fields of movement relationships, through practices of improvisation focused on proprioception, to create Metatopias: fields of indeterminacy.

The Metabody is a central concept of Jaime del Val’s Metahumanist proposal. It transcends posthumanism by saying that not only is every body an expanded body (in technology) but that it is a relational movement: from bacteria and molecules to “human” societies, where it is a question of understanding the degree of alignment of each metabody to open those that have been closed to greater indetermination. It also exceeds the actual-virtual bipolairty of Deleuze and Guattari by claiming the ontological indeterminacy of metabodies and the need tot sustain it, diagnosing cllosures. As a choral proposal, the metabody is a concept associated with the Dionysian, the ecstatic, the return to an undivided flow of becoming and an orgiastic evolution that underlies all biodiversity in the biosphere, for which it is urgent to overcome that other reductive metabody that dominates currently: that of extinction.

 

METABODIES:

Essays in Spanish: