ONTOHACKERS
Radical Movement Philosophy in the Age of Extinctions and Algorithms
A book by Jaime del Val
Forthcoming in 2022 in punctum books
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/ontohackers-radical-movement-philosophy-in-the-age-of-algorithms/
https://punctumbooks.com/catalogue/
Finally on its way to print after nine years of evolutions!
“In Ontohackers Jaime Del Val unfurls a unique theory of the body, in consonance with Deleuze and Guattari’s exhortation: “look only at the movements!” Drawing on a broad range of philosophical sources, ancient and modern, and in dialogue with complexity theory and embodied cognition, Del Val develops his own highly original approach to the body in movement – or more precisely, to the body as movement. This entails focusing on the too-often ignored experiential dimension of proprioception, which Del Val suggestively explores as the generative matrix of the body. The theoretical exploration is one prong of a multi-dimensioned approach, closely bound up with Del Val’s long-time practice of “meta-media” / “meta-body” performance. Ontohackers diagnoses the regimes of movement that have formatted the body and curtailed its potential, offering an alternative glimpse of the body unbound.” Brian Massumi
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Ontohackers redefines what movement, worlds and bodies are through the sense of proprioception reconceptualised as formless fluctuation field, a movement matrix that is itself also thought, and which underlies all life forms and fields including the inorganic. Our worlds are made of endless such entangled fields n-folding in never-ending variation or enferance, actively propelled by quantum fluctuations. The current planetary crisis has emerged due to an accidental evolutionary alignment, narrowing, and impoverishment of that matrix’s indeterminacy, that appeared gradually and eventually with bipedalism, and which created an imbalance between the larger proprioceptive field and its brain, and made the atrophied body extend itself technically in geometric fields gradually covering the planet, along with its fears, with disastrous consequences that are unleashing an unprecedented type of mass extinction and species suicide.
The reply -which is urgently due if we are to reduce even slightly the collapse coming up over the next decades- is in recovering a lost sensorimotor plasticity which is also cognitive, affective and relational plasticity, through developing movement technes for cultivating BI, Body Intelligence, reversing and taking elsewhere the failed evolution culminating in AI, stepping down from humanist suprematist pedestals, undoing our dependency from unsustainable killing machines of sedentary consumerism that impoverish experience, stopping the reproduction of a species that has become plague (by reversing heteronormative reproductive dogmas till we reach preagricultural population levels), stopping the animal holocaust and planetary-scale disruption, and recovering the joys of moving with the world, in symbiotic mutation, towards unprecedented evolutionary variations: this is our cosmic responsibility for all life on Earth.
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Content:
Ontohackers is a metabook made of seven books distributed in three parts, each part around 300-400 pages, in a single volume of approx. 1,000 pages.
PART I – Radical movement philosophy
Book 1: Towards a movement r/evolution – (An introduction)
Book 2: In search of lost proprioception – (A metaception theory of BI – Body Intelligence)
Book 3: Radical movement philosophy – (Clinaos, Metabodies, Enferance: a radical field theory)
PART II – R/evolution technologies
Book 4: Swarming chaosmology – (Sketches for a theory of orgiastic cosmic evolution)
Book 5: The Algoricene – (A kinetic ontology of power in the age of algorithms and extinctions)
Book 6: Ontohacking – (The metaformative turn: a Dionysian aesthetico-politics for Planetary Health)
PART III – Metahistories of Movement
Book 7: How movement has been thought – (Sketches for a genealogy of field thinking: a reverse history of philosophy)
Jaime del Val (or Jayrion K. Val) is an artist-philosopher-activist, ontohacker-metaformer and promoter of Metabody and Reverso. Since 2001 Jay develops transdisciplinary projects in the convergence of all the arts (performance, dance, media arts, visual arts, music, architecture), old and new technologies, philosophy and activism, which have been presented in more than 30 countries on 4 continents, in many prestigious institutions (universities, festivals, museums), as well as in streets, refugee camps, squats or jungles. Jay promotes the art of metaformance and the technes of ontohacking and BI. A referent in postqueer metahumanism, Jay has published over 120 essays, edited several journals, and organised over 60 international forums and conferences. As a queer and environmental activist Jay has led international initiatives. As a musician Jay has recorded 13 albums, and exhibits work as a visual artist. Jay is neurodiverse, mestiza, non-binary microsexual, vegan and trans-species, neither human nor cyborg, neither man nor woman, and is not on Facebook. After years travelling and in cities, Jay is now partly retiring with hir trans-species family to rural environments, developing technes for Planetary Health, in preparation of becoming a naked gatherer in a forest, dancing till death arrives. www.jaimedelval.com
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Other Abstracts:
Underlying planetary-scale systems of domination and disruption – as well as our daily anxieties and discomforts – is a millennia old impoverishment of bodies, movements and the senses. How we move is how we think, feel, know, perceive, relate and create our worlds. The more narrow our movements, the poorer our realities; the more plastic our movements, the richer our worlds. In the depths of our tissues lies a neglected capacity for endless qualitative variation of our movement-perception that we need to unleash if we are to counteract the global crisis. Not in quantity but in cultivating the smallest sustained variation lies the power for a future of the planet.
Ontohackers challenges 2,500 years of metaphysics of being and immobility by proposing a Radical Movement Philosophy that defines movements, bodies and perception (every event/thing in the cosmos) as entangled fluctuating fields capable of endless dynamics (modes of internal and relational resonance), along diverse degrees of alignment, with proprioception as primordial perception. It proposes a formless field ontology in times of hypercontrol, where at stake is to mobilize plasticity, capacity for indeterminate symbiosis and mutation -the consistency of the Open- in face of millennia old tendencies to reduction that are enacting an extinction process: a Planetary Holocaust.
Counteracting this epochal process implies unleashing less reductive movements-perceptions than those dominating over the past millennia in the Algoricene (age of algorithms). Unleashing BI (Body Intelligence) as indeterminate, selforganising movement of bodies is presented as necessary means towards a Planetary Health: by regaining and reinventing a lost experiential richness that allows both to undo the dependence on unsustainable systems of exploitation and killing, and to stop the massive multiplication of a species that has become the plague: shifting from a reductive and oppressive conception of sex as reproduction to an orgiastic metasexual conception of collective, symbiotic mutation.
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A universe’s evolution is a process of ongoing variation towards increasing diversity, as quantum fluctuations unfold in fields, holding together through proprioception, the sense of internal movement, in the balance of consistency and openness. The highest possible affirmation of a universe and of life is to bring forth as rich and diverse expressions of fluctuation as possible. When openness and variation get reduced domination appears and evolution gets blocked. Renaissance perspective culminated a millennia long process of reduction of sensori-motor plasticity, which underlies algorithmic control today, and constitutes a planetary-scale field of algorithmic movements and reduction underlying the current extinction process, where impoverished body = impoverished planet, and where compulsory heterosexuality (massive species multiplication), sedentary culture (massive production-consumption), and human exceptionalism are leading us and the planet to an extinction cycle.
How to revert the currently dominant Trash-human Unhacenment into a Metahuman flourishing? By regaining the joys of moving-sensing-feeling! In a double reversal mode, this book exposes the dominant narratives of the past millennia as counter-evolutionary cosmic anomaly that needs to be undone with unprecedented movement r/evolutions. Underlying every apparent fixity lies a narrow movement, and beyond it a potential multiverse of other less narrow movements that may be enacted. New, more plastic movement and proprioception technes -choral, multisensory improvisation practices, which are also thinking practices, of the common body and the disalignment- are needed to take on the movement of variation in evolution, unfolding multiple modes of BI (Body Intelligence) capable of exceeding the reductive inflexion of the Age of Algorithms, towards neurodiverse, technodiverse, mestiza, trans- and metaspecies, micro- and metasexual cultures, for a renewed Planetary Health.