Trans Subjectivity

Usually, understanding of the world has been divided between objective and subjective. Phenomenology and Philosophy of language also included the intersubjective in this comprehension. Some researchers have detected needing to go further and study a broader concept. The study of trans-subjectivity seeks to fill that gap and delve into a novel concept.

As a form of creative practice, collaboration holds the promise to extend capacities, challenge hierarchies, and create new forms of community. At best, however, it is a fraught experiment, frankly characterized by discord and strife, often reinstating the same power dynamics it seeks to confront. A key problem arises from is how to accommodate the desires of the individual and tend to the challenges set forth by the group without the need to balance failure and breakdown against success and coherence. What processes might facilitate that balance? From within the conditions of certain types of failure, ones where discord runs high and the individual self lacks cohesion, poetic, relational networks arise and include in their processes the shadowy, unnerving aspects of discord along with the sharing of capacities. This essay argues that, beyond the intentions of the participants or the institutions hosting them, collaboration opens ways to contend with difference as creative material and not just as an attribute that opposes normality. I consider a number of artists’ groups, projects, and collaborative methods where the subject slips out of a volitional, rational place to demonstrate how difficult creative networks can give rise to strange processes of what I call “trans-subjectivity.” I account for situated styles of collaborative practice where the radicalized subject can creatively, unexpectedly, and continuously develop itself beyond the confines of institutional power.

As a form of creative practice, collaboration holds the promise to extend capacities, challenge hierarchies, and create new forms of community. At best, however, it is a fraught experiment, frankly characterized by discord and strife, often reinstating the same power dynamics it seeks to confront. A key problem arises from is how to accommodate the desires of the individual and tend to the challenges set forth by the group without the need to balance failure and breakdown against success and coherence. What processes might facilitate that balance? From within the conditions of certain types of failure, ones where discord runs high and the individual self lacks cohesion, poetic, relational networks arise and include in their processes the shadowy, unnerving aspects of discord along with the sharing of capacities. This essay argues that, beyond the intentions of the participants or the institutions hosting them, collaboration opens ways to contend with difference as creative material and not just as an attribute that opposes normality. I consider a number of artists’ groups, projects, and collaborative methods where the subject slips out of a volitional, rational place to demonstrate how difficult creative networks can give rise to strange processes of what I call “trans-subjectivity.” I account for situated styles of collaborative practice where the radicalized subject can creatively, unexpectedly, and continuously develop itself beyond the confines of institutional power.

"From Haraway to Wolfe, Barad to Bennett, posthuman discourse in recent decades unfolds the relational dynamics of humans and non-humans in complex actor networks, mapping the varied and changeable ways in which animals, machines, institutions, environments, and discourses co-constitute human practices. In Avatar Bodies (2004), Ann Weinstone, while supportive of the project generally, is critical of the way these discussions elide human-to-human interactions operating in the same kind of co-constituting dynamics. In my opinion, this is because the notion of “the human,” however complicated by posthuman filters, remains a subject in “radical solitude” where “life” is only ever the life of each individual.
In this paper I consider a radical configuration of subjectivity in movement that emerges in the video installations of Natalie Bookchin; by sourcing videos from YouTube and Vimeo, she samples, remixes, and choreographs bodies performing in complex networks of relations that include staged environments, mirrored reflections, and renderings of expressive movement.  that are at once arbitrated by the technology of social networks and becoming virtuosic through their awkward renderings of contemporary popular dance. Layering her own affective labor with that of her subjects, the artists’ body and the bodies in the videos commingle as material workers and immaterial voices toward what Andrew Pickering calls a material “mangle of practice.” Exceeding the limitations of normative subject positions, these bodies momentarily become mingle in a meshed and mashed virtuosic a-productive play, whereby hyper-material connections generate forms of alter-human-ness, of trans-subjectivity, informed by the vast overlay of actor network in an unpredictable, affective, powerful becoming multiple.

KEYWORDS: hyper-materialism, collaboration, new media narrative, actor networks, trans-subjectivity,"