METAHUMAN FUTURES FORUM 

METAHUMAN STUDIES   

METAHUMANITIES NETWORK 

&  CENTRE  &  PUBLICATIONS  &  ACTIVISM  &   PHILOSOPHY

METAHUMANITIES:   INSTITUTE & NETWORK – MULTIVERSITY & STUDIES – FORUMS & CONFERENCES – JOURNAL &  BOOK SERIES – MEDIA & VIDEO CHANNELS – METAFORMANCE AESTHETICS – METATOPIAN DIONYSIAN POLITICS

1st Online Metahuman Futures Forum – 2022

1st METAHUMAN FUTURES FORUM – MFF 2022 Lesvos 

2nd METAHUMAN FUTURES FORUM – MFF 2023 Lesvos

3rd METAHUMAN FUTURES FORUM – MFF 2024 Lesvos

4th METAHUMAN FUTURES FORUM – 1st Iberoamerican Online  2024

METAHUMAN FUTURES MANIFESTO (2022)

METAHUMAN FUTURES SPECIAL ISSUE – Journal of Posthumanism (2023)

Reverso/Metabody Institute present the Metahumanities / Metahuman Futures initiatives, events and publications, which propose to tackle without palliatives the fact of the current 6th mass extinction, its associated environmental and civilizatory collapse potentially arriving over the next decades, and its roots in human overpopulation, technical “progress”, and sedentary way of living; likewise the forum aims to open up a bold debate on alternative metahuman futures and on other ways of living towards a planetary regeneration, including proposals for radical mutations of the species quite different from, and perhaps diametrically opposed to those proposed by transhumanism.

See here more on THE METAHUMAN ALTERNATIVE. Here on METAHUMANISM.

The series proposes a space and process of radical critique, in protest against a prevailing complicitness of academia, activism and the arts, with what we will be calling the Planetary Holocaust or Holocide, challenging postures of fake criticality as well as those of rampant techno-fascism and concealed imperialism. The series proposes to face all the great taboo questions such as human overpopulation and way of living, taking further a number of existing critical frames in critical posthumanism, queer, decolonial, crip theory and other frameworks.

With the Extinction & Trash-human Studies / Planetary Health & Metahuman Studies Programme, the Metahuman(ist) Futures Forum series launched by Reverso/Metabody Institute for Planetary Health wishes to start a new series of debates on what we consider to be the most challenging but unaddressed topics of our times, absent from many critical forums which are often still biased by humanistic views and by palliative approaches, of putting patches to the sinking Titanic, while trying to not question current ways of living and overpopulation, which implies a complicitness with a planetary Holocide and an extinction crisis of unprecedented dimensions and nature in the history of the Earth.

The MF (Metahuman Futures) initiative includes (more information soon):

  1. Metahumanities Network
    1. With the support of the Metabody Network and with the following Associated networks: the Beyond Humanism Network, the  World Posthuman Society, the Global Posthuman Network, The Posthuman Lab.
    2. Advisory Board: Yunus Tuncel, Cagdas Dedeoglu, Evi Sampanikou, Jan Stasienko, Stefan Lornez Sorgner, Francesca Ferrando, Yvonne Förster, Kevin LaGrandeur, Sacha Kagan, Mark Coeckelbergh – Coordinator: Jaime del Val.
  2. Metahuman Centre & spaces & communities & associated initiatives
    1. Metahuman Institute for Planetary Health – (+info soon)
  3. Metahuman Studies (see below)
  4. Metahuman Futures FORUM (see below)
    1. Online events – including talks and video channels
    2. Physical events
      1. including talks, workshops and performances
      2. linked to the new EU project and events in different countries
      3. linked to Centre for movement technes & planetary health
        1. FIRST PHYSICAL EVENT IN LESVOS 2022
        2. FIRST ONLINE EVENT 2022 ANNOUNCED SOON
  5. Metahuman Futures Publications & Journal & Book series  – online journal, books and other – including publications with associated journals and publishers.
    1. Associated Publications: Reverso/Metabody Journal and Journal of Posthumanism
      1. including upcoming Special CFP in the Journal of Posthumanism for 2023 – more information HERE.
    2. Metahumanities online publicationas and media and video channels.
  6. Metahuman R/Evolution: Activism, campaigns, legal actions, protests, dsialignments – (+info soon)
    1. Metahuman Transition: Disalignment Programme/Protocols  – (+info soon)
    2. Metahuman Tékhnes
  7. Metahumanist Philosophy  +  (Pr)inciples

STUDIES

Extinction & Trash-human studies – Planetary Health & Metahuman Studies

  • Extinction & Planetary Health Studies // Trash-human & Metahuman studies – two interrelated branches, outlined in this essay:
    • Trash-human and Extinction studies: the study of trash-humanist processes leading to extinction and diagnosing of all aspects of the extinction process, implying not only the mass species extinction and threat of human extinction but also the animal Holocaust, human overpopulation, extractivism, urbanisation, imperialism, wars, and all current critical processes and domination systems threatening present and future life on Earth, that can be also referred to as Planetary Holocaust or Holocide.
    • Metahuman and Planetary Health studies: the study of alternatives to current technohuman civilization, ways of living and overpopulation, towards a restoration of planetary health and the flourishing of future life. This implies defining planetary health and its link to the flourishing of biodiversity, and the understanding of the cosmic and geological conditions for biodiversity. It also implies the definition of a Metahuman alternative, politics, and future.
  • It is a meta-academic Sudies field as it goes beyond the academy and across its existing fields, connecting institutions and non-institutional domains, and doing so from outside the institutions. The academy (or museum, or parliament) is no longer a site form which radical critique and counterproposals can emerge, it is a disciplinary site of alignments, in all its architectures (of buildings and knowledges). But it can get involved in a broader meta-academic process of redefinitions of all our life technes and knowledges, towards choral societies of disaligned moving bodies, of radically embodied and kinetic knowledge.
  • As different from most other programmes, groups or books on Extinction studies[1] and on Planetary health or One Health[2] this field approaches extinction as including the wider planetary, climate and civilizatory collapse that involves a self extinction, and does a radical critique of how the entire civilizatory process emerging over the past 10,000 years at least is intrinsically related to the extinction process, implying a radical evolutionary falure that we urgently must acknowledge, facing the fact that our way of “civilized” living and overpopulation cannot but cause a mass extinction and self extinction, so that radical metahuman alternatives need to be mobilised.

OPEN CALL

>>>>>  FIRST PHYSICAL EVENT IN LESVOS 2022

The new series of forums is part of the Multiversity, part of the Metabody Forum.  During 2022 a number of online events will bring together intellectuals, artists and activists from five continents to discuss on the proposed topics and in connection with other events such as the BHC (more information on related events and networks soon). The project is linked to the Metabody network, and to the new EU Project BODYNET-KHORÓS, starting July 2022.

It will also be related to several publications (more information soon).  The following text is proposed as provocation for discussion, (Pdf accesible in the link below):

      • Del Val, Jaime. 2022. “Trash-Human Unhancement and Planetary Health. Undoing the Planetary Holocaust by Reinventing Movement and the Body: A Manifesto for Cosmic Response-Ability and the Future of Life”. Journal of Posthumanism 2 (1). London, UK:3-30. https://doi.org/10.33182/joph.v2i1.1876 .

 

We launch now an ongoing  OPEN CALL and will be announcing several online and physical events, as well as video channels and written publications during the year.

If you are interested in doing a presentation or contribution (talk, writing, performance, workshop or other) on the topics below, or in proposing other topics, and activities or collaborations as person or institution in the network, please write to metabody [@] metabody [.] eu.

 

 Upcoming Special CFP in the Journal of Posthumanism for 2023 – more information soon.

 

 2022 TOPIC & Manifesto

 

 ¿Can we create a liveable future? …(for the planet and all its life forms)

The metahuman alternative … or: Don’t choose extinction!

¿Can we (even just partially) stop the mass extinction and self-extinction under way?

¿Can we stop calling a mass extinction by the name of progress?

¿Can we stop looking to the side with palliative self-referential patches?

¿How can we reinvent ourselves?

Rethinking the global crisis in the age of pandemics, climate change, polarisation and social control.

Decolonising bodies-worlds

 

“Don’t choose extinction!” said the dinosaur speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in the video done by UN for the Glasgow Climate Summit in 2021. UN is not and entity suspect of radicalism. That we are creating a mass extinction and our own extinction is an established fact. That it could come in a matter of a few decades, by 2050 or before, also. Why does nearly everyone seem to want to ignore this, the most aberrant and terrible of all possible facts? Btw: the human is just of the 8 million+ species on Earth, and is also the only one threatening all others (and itself).

Two years after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, with increasingly visible and alarming climate change effects and reports, with increasing social polarisation and dystopian digital control, and with a 3rd World War in the air through Putin’s invasion of Ukraine that is including renewed nuclear threats, amongst many other planetary problems, more clearly than ever expose the unprecedented crisis point and challenge that “humanity” is facing, as not only the future of humanity is at risk but that of life on the planet altogether, with an already ongoing mass extinction process, largely due to unchallenged humanistic (and transhumanistic) supremacy assumptions. This crisis that some voices have denounced for many years (since 140 years if we think of Nietzsche) is now showing a face that gives no room to negationism, including the most recent IPCC Climate Report. Serious reflection is needed on the Trash-human Planetary Unhancement that is happening and how to revert it. Is the human to be remembered as that only species that created a mass extinction and a self-extinction?

The reply to the crisis is generally by increasing the very causes of the crisis, ignoring the major questions and clinging to humanist supremacy pedestals.

During these two years of pandemic and increasingly palpable climate and generalised crisis the major questions remain utterly unaddresseded: How can we humans stop being the planet’s pandemic, stop driving ourselves and the planet to extinction, and start contributing to biodiversity instead of destroying it? Besides continuing to create our own extinction and mass extinction as we are doing now the other option is a deep metahuman mutation, (actually the opposite to the one proposed by transhumanism which continues ignoring the core problems and perpetuating the worst nightmares of hyperhumanistic suprematism). It is high time to call things by their names and stop avoiding the most problematic questions that haunt humanity and the planet for millennia but have NOT been addressed.

Starting with the need to step down from human suprematist pedestals, stop multiplying as a species, stop reproducing for a century; and stop our complicitness with the false comforts of an insane consumer society that is unleashing a planetary holocaust, with all its delirium of unsustainable processes of production, transportation communication, consumption, waste, and killing; and do it by regaining our sense of movement, developing new body intelligences for a real, unprecedented metahuman mutation. HERE is where the metahumanistic alternative could prove its significance.

Even in the most critical circles there seems to be reluctance to acknowledge that the 6th great mass extinction, caused by techno-human action over the past millennia, is well under way, that we have long reached a critical point and that general collapse could well come over the next decades. Meanwhile critical circles seem to be looking to the side, and keep engaged, at best in self-referential discussions about human individual freedoms, and at worst in rampant imperialism or fascism.

Can we maybe start by calling things by their name? Can we start naming it mass extinction instead of progress, concentration camp instead of farm, oppressive reproduction regime instead of family, atrophy instead of comfort, trash-human instead of transhuman, slavery instead of work, hyper-surveillance instead of connectivity, fascist desert of the real instead of social network, hypercontrol device instead of smartphone, earth-killing instead of quick transport…?

 

Topics, provocations for debate (provisional):

  1. Defining & diagnosing extinction & planetary health
    1. Extinction:
      1. Extinction as planetary and civilizatory collapse.
      2. Aspects of extinction.
    2. Planetary health:
      1. Non anthropocentric accounts of planetary health.
      2. Planetary health as conditions for proliferation of biodiversity.
      3. Geological and cosmic conditions for biodiversification.
    3. Calling things by their names:
      1. Are “progress” and “civilization” implicitly implying extinction?
  2. (Why) is every form of imperialism and colonialism implicitly leading to extinction?
    1. New modes of imperialism: the digital metaverse and space conquest as two new extinction trends?
  3. Technological singularity or extinction singularity? What are we really running towards?
    1. Transhuman, Hyperhuman or Trash-human? What is the more accurate name for the dominant powers?
  4. Can there ever be a sustainable digital-colonial culture?
    1. What does the metaphor of “the cloud” conceal?
    2. How is control society evolving in times of the metaverse and quantum computation?
    3. Why there is no planet B nor space escape: undoing cosmological ignorance.
    4. Hate algorithms, polarisation, antisocial media and atrophied bodies: can we combat hate without regaining sensibility?
    5. Should dystopian control and governmentality powers such as Facebook and its companies (now Meta) be criminalised? How are these different from the Chinese social credit system that could perhaps colonise the world?
  5. The culture of immobility and our dependency on technological systems that creates a trash-covered planet.
    1. Rethinking the role of movement and the body.
    2. Is the future in regaining the joys of sensing and moving with the world?
    3. Does decolonizing the Earth mean decolonising the body from millennia of geometric reductions and their will to control?
    4. Is the reply not in control but in regaining indeterminacy in movement?
    5. Is accelleration grounded on an impoverishment of experience?
  6. Age of pandemics: shall we keep increasing dystopian control and human immunity or shall we care about the disruption of planetary health that underlies pandemics?
    1. Immunity or orgy? Evolution is fundamentally a bacterial-viral orgy. Where is immunity taking us?
  7. The climate crisis and the need for a radical renewal of our relation to the Earth.
    1. ¿(How) can the human contribute to biodiversity instead of killing it?
  8. The overpopulation problem: why is it such a taboo and how to face it?
    1. Can there ever be a liveable future with this population, and growing?
    2. Are we to criminalise human reproduction for a century till we reach pre-industrial levels?
    3. Is the future in non-heternoromative families and trans-species kinships?
  9. Can there ever be a sustainable future with this sedentary and consumer ways of living?
    1. Is the future in gatherer cultures, abandoning the false comforts of atrophied culture, regaining the joys of moving, developing unprecedented architectures and modes of Body Intelligence?
  10. 100 billion animals per year spend their lives in concentration camps before going to the slaughterhouse: what do we do with this Planetary Holocaust?
    1. Is it necessary to criminalise any type of animal product and farm?
    2. Is a radical vegan culture simply meaning a non-criminal, non-extinctional culture? Towards a global radical vegan culture?
    3. Towards a lobal nudist culture that stops neglecting the body and making us dependent on unsustainable textile industries?
  11. Defining the metahuman alternative.
    1. Towards a non paternalistic relational ethics, and why individual ethics is far from enough: how are our minutest daily gestures entangled with planetary scale disruption?
    2. If the limits to our freedom are in the freedom of others, how is this other to be conceptualised: the planet and all its life forms?
  12. Neurodiversity, decoloniality, (post)queerness/metasexuality, ecology/meta-speciation … the list of becomings is long and each one implies disalignments.
    1. Neurodiverse futures – somatodiverse, sensorimotor-diverse…
    2. Decolonial futures – indigenous, mestiza, migrant…
    3. Metasexual futures – ecoqueer, postqueer, ecosex, veganarqueer…
    4. Metaspecies futures – eco-vegan, general animal liberation…
    5. Metahuman futures – becoming molecular swarm – BI R/evolution…
  13. Can the human open up its narrow sensibility, stop seeing only the tree of short term profit and start seeing the forest behind? And how?
    1. Can we learn animal ethics of co-sensing instead of splitting and abstracting ourselves?
    2. Is the future in AI or in BI (body intelligence)?
    3. Body technologies and improvisation practices: towards a Dionysian politics of life.
  14. Is there a human or many humanities? Or metahumanities: symbiotic processes of becoming that we need to claim?
    1. Stop pretending to be human: Species stryke?
    2. “Crime against the earth is now the worst crime. Remain faithful to the Earth”: Nietzsche as precursor, and other precursors back to Lucretius, the Presocratics and beyond.
  15. Metatopics
    1. On the intrinsic relation between how we move and how we think, and the inseparability of theory and/as practice. Rethinking our relations and modes of knowledge production.
    2. Metaforum: how to define our modes of relating, communicating, exchanging. How to relate in more sustainable manner, the environmental cost of going to places, and of videoconferencing, the formats, the media, vegan food…
    3. Defining the Trash-human and Extinction Studies field.
    4. Workshops, spaces and actions for non-rational, neurodiverse, animal and other bodily ways of thinking.
    5. Performances, metaformances, other.
    6. Book presentations and networks.

 

 

[1] See for instance https://extinctionstudies.org/people/, https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo23093383.html, http://cup.columbia.edu/book/extinction-studies/9780231178815, https://extinctionstudiesdtp.leeds.ac.uk/.

[2] See UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) Project on Planetary Health https://unfccc.int/climate-action/momentum-for-change/planetary-health. See report on Planetary Health from Rockefeller Foundation: https://www.thelancet.com/commissions/planetary-health https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60901-1/fulltext. See Planetary Health Alliance at Harvard: https://www.planetaryhealthalliance.org/planetary-health.  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Health_Model and https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/one-health.