Katernyi I.V. (2018) Trans-mobilities in post-human era:how is social order still possible?

Abstract

Emerged posthuman era features the  transformation,  mutation,  and reinvention of social identities of agents. Transgenders, robots, сlones have been progressively involved in social community and, thus, have contributed to profound normative morphogenesis in the modern society. Consequently, it results in challenging primordial heteronormativity framed with some fundamental ascriptive binaries, which is evident with transgressive confusion of the following oppositions: (а) opposition between the human and subhuman (e.g. legitimation of animal or fetal rights); (b) opposition between the cultural and natural (e.g. cyborgs); (с) opposition between the animate and inanimate (e.g. enactment of android robots); (d) opposition between the corporeal and incorporeal (e.g. virtual, ‘augmented’ and ‘mixed’ reality). A range of practices related to such transgression can be perceived with employing a conception of ‘trans-mobility’ that implies various self-determined individual transitions from the former ascribed position to a new transitive one as well as externally induced transpositions, orientated on forced alteration of individual and collective statuses/identities of varied subjects and objects. The paper will examine three typical modes of morphological trans-mobility singled out to delineate the most important arrays which ontological binaries are being de-ascribed in: (1) visceral trans-mobility, pertaining to all possible options for modifying human corporality (including radical body modification as well as sex, gender, and race reassignment); (2) conversional trans-mobility, going beyond the confines of the line between life and death, being and nonbeing, corporeal (material) and incorporeal (immaterial) ontology in a number of phenomena (e.g. from bitcoins to clones); (3) prosopopoeian trans-mobility, involving initially non-social creatures into active social enactment (e.g. from pets to robots). Under this approach, the core question of the study is how current normative morphogenesis is embedded into socio-normative order. Drawing upon the theory of recognition (A. Honneth et al.), the posed hypothesis is about the morphotaxis (as opposite to morphogenesis), a latent compensatory mechanism to maintain the primordial social order by the way of persistent reproduction of heteronormativity. Based on some empirical data, it is concluded that the dichotomized sexual (male-female), genetical (sexual human – asexual human) and biological (animate-inanimate) patterns with the corresponding social norms continue to constitute the morphological foundation of the primordial social order in spite of challenging from advanced post-human practices.