Silicon cage and post-sexualitiesThe emergence of transnational forms of digital art-religion must be understood in
contexts of postmodern global capitalism. The “iron cage” of modernity rapidly
becomes the silicon cage of techno-financial capitalism, while the human body is
reduced to a carbon cage, a map of genes and rights colonized by high-tech
engineering, legal intervention and commodification (in a Robocop scenario). At the
semiotic level, fast production and circulation of signs and commodities undermine
the subject’s ability to make sense of reality, forcing him or her to make dramatic and
uneasy decisions (Appadurai 1996; Giddens 1991; Jameson 1991).
On the other hand, the corrosion of tradition by globalization enables the
emergence of post-traditional identities by means of reflexive and cosmopolitan
forms, understood as “detachments from provincial identities” and “strangeness
within and outside the self” (Cheah and Robbins 1998). The very problematization
of locality-making must be seen as a resource rather than as a barrier for the production
of meaning and identity (Lasch 1994). Thus, the retrieving of reflexive meaning
from global chaos can contribute to overcoming the corrosive effects of global
commodification (Turner 1994). It is through the interplay between local environs
and global processes that such aesthetic hermeneutics reconfigures time—space
notions and structures of affection and belonging. As the production of localities
and of subjectivities are interrelated (Appadurai 1996; Povinelli and Chauncey
1999), the “self” becomes “the new strategic possibility,” an open project of reflexive
elaboration within a “life politics” (Foucault and Lotringer 1989; Giddens 1992).
The question is to evince how reflexive subjectivities are formed within deterritorialized
conditions.
In this sense, rather than agonizing chaos, reflexive globalization also provides the
conditions through which New Age and Techno can rework the new cages of
postmodern capitalism. Through playful moves of micro-transgression and
calibrations of “intensity-moderation,” we may be witnessing exercises of
emancipation, or, conversely, escapes from the pasteurized rationale of modern life.
Or still, echoing Weber and Foucault, “something other we don’t know what it is.”
All in all, the central characters of critical poststructuralism—the mad, the marginal,
and the artist—are metonymically condensed in the “global freak,” the schizo-
nomad of this research.
Art therefore arises as a site of experimentation for reconstituting social life and
harmonizing spheres of science and politics. If so, how to evaluate social movements
of liberation? According to Foucault, they are innocuous in so far as they remain
parasitic of science, rooted in the dominant apparatus of “sexuality” and
“biopower,” which constitute the modern subject of discipline, production, and self-
control. Not only have liberation movements centered their struggles on questions of
sex and “natural” rights of the “individual,” but they have also subsumed their
tactical moves under scientific modes as resources of legitimacy. Since these gestures
preclude a real move away from the legal-scientific apparatus of “sexuality,”
242 GLOBAL NOMADS IN IBIZA AND GOA