liberation movements remain entrapped in the epistemic vectors they seek to
transcend.
“‘Couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?’ This was not some vapid plea
for aestheticism, but a suggestion for separating our ethics, our lives, from our
science, our knowledge” (Hacking 1986:239). Liberation from and through modern
arrangements (market, state, and science) will require a new ethical “morality”
centered on an “aesthetics of life” in which science and morality play an
informative, not a normative, role (Foucault 1984:611). “New forms of
community, co-existence and pleasure” would overcome scientific colonization and
body politics centered on the “normal-pathologic” binary of confinement and
exclusion. By displacing the modern apparatus of “sexuality,” a new erotico-
aesthetic ethics can operate as a counter-apparatus leading towards an age of post-
sexuality (a new arrangement of bodies, selves, intimacies, sociabilities, knowledges,
and institutions).
The central question is how erotico-aesthetic formations of Techno and New Age
contribute to this post-sexuality age. As such, they amoralize desires by emphasizing
degenitalized pleasures; they appropriate techno-scientific knowledge by
transgressing their uses and disciplinary foundations; they defy the centralizing logic
of legal administration of bodies and spaces by promoting rituals that celebrate
marginalization; they criticize modern economic rationality by pointing out its
ecological irrationality. In sum, as countercultural formations, Techno and New
Age queer, transgress, and reverse dominant devices that constitute modern
subjectivities.
“Limit-experiences” of digital shamanism and nomadic
spiritualityBecause the forging of the self is experienced at the phenomenological level, the
analysis of subjectivity forms must consider lived experiences, subjective practices,
and imaginaries. Devised by Foucault via Nietzsche and Bataille, “an experience is
something you come out of changed” (Foucault 1978:27). Since the macro-analysis
of countercultures is important but insufficient for understanding the nature of
emerging subjectivities, the transformative power of queer spiritualities must be
assessed with reference to the notion of “limit-experience” (ibid.:Jay 1993).
At the intersection of body, power, and identity, a limit-experience happens as a
traumatic or sublime event that transgresses the boundaries of coherent subjectivity,
“tearing the subject from itself” at the limit of living, intensity, and impossibility.
Yet, in a second stage, such events require recollection in a space outside: “an
experience is, of course, something one has alone; but it cannot have its full impact
unless the individual manages to escape from pure subjectivity in a way that others
can at least cross paths with or retrace it” (Foucault 1978:40). The mutual
acknowledgement of something extraordinary animates a sense of sharing that
bonds individuals and the world.
ANTHONY D’ANDREA 243