Transmobilities in posthuman era: How is social order still possible?

Abstract

The today’s post-human era is characterized by transformation, mutation, and reinvention of social identities of agents. Transgenders, robots, сlones have been increasingly involved in social community and, thus, contributed to profound normative morphogenesis in the contemporary society. Consequently, there is a challenging primordial heteronormativity with some fundamental ascriptive binaries evident in transgressive confusion of the following oppositions: between human and subhuman (e.g. legitimation of animal or fetal rights); between cultural and natural (cyborgs); between animate and inanimate (android robots); between corporeal and incorporeal (virtual, ‘augmented’ and ‘mixed’ reality). A range of practices related to such transgression can be considered as trans-mobility that implies various self-determined individual transitions from the former ascribed position to a new transitive one and external transpositions due to forced alteration of individual or collective statuses/identities. The article considers three typical modes of morphological trans-mobility to identify the most important arrays the ontological binaries are de-ascribed in: visceral trans-mobility pertaining to all possible options to modify human corporality (including radical body modification); conversional trans-mobility beyond the line between life and death, being and nonbeing, corporeal (material) and incorporeal (immaterial) ontology (from bitcoins to clones); prosopopoeian trans-mobility involving initially non-social creatures into active social life (from pets to robots). The author seeks to answer the question of how current normative morphogenesis is embedded into social-normative order. Based on the theory of recognition, the article considers morphotaxis (an opposite of morphogenesis) as a latent compensatory mechanism to maintain the primordial social order by persistent reproduction of heteronormativity. Based on some empirical data, the author shows that dichotomized sexual (male—female), genetical (sexual—asexual) and biological (animate—inanimate) patterns with corresponding social norms still constitute the morphological foundation of the primordial social order despite the advanced post-human practices.