Posthuman imagination

Mouth (moving image made with a Panasonic/Lumix digital camera. Julie Clarke (2011)

In a posthuman world identity becomes a paradox - image, after all IS everything - become who you want to become, but it's also nothing because your face and body may be changed at will as long as you have the funds for high end technological interface with Second Life, you've got so much money you can spend it on virtual clothes and accessories, a virtual house and land and even construct a business or territory to lord over in your resplendent avatar, fantasy you, oh you beautiful fantasy post, post human you. If you have access to advanced medical technologies (cosmetic surgery, liposuction, medical intervention) you can modify your visage, indeed, so complex a scenario that your arse can end up on your face, your rectum in an entirely different part of your body, your heart not your own but that of a pig. In a Deleuzian fantasy we could have a one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate, regurgitate your own waste and devour it again - primate holding its own excrement looks out at the human who for all purposes keeps his animal nature at bay. The body merely a waste disposal unit, the body a machine more than human, but maybe more than, more than human in its ability to tolerate shit. And your breast, not of your mother but already inculcated into self, forever psychically attached to your own suckling mouth, may be redesigned to project from any part of your body, enclosed beneath a sheer top - well that's got to seduce someone, even if it's only yourself. Language from the mouth, undecipherable, incoherent, base, abject, discarded as pure dribble, leaks from the closed orifice in a scream of 'Not me, not post human! And yet the cry IS remake me, place me on the autopsy table, reassemble the fragmented pieces into something different, something other, because the prior configuration, damaged, deranged, no longer functions. My mouth, culture/nurture all rolled into the one gesture of yearning and longing remains mute in some insidious landscape of desire not of my making at all. If the libidinal band glows hot then it does so in fits and bursts, heating up and cooling down in this make-shift body, neither human, animal or machine, but all as one in a mad symphony of the post human imagination.