Flying Bodies: Skywalker and Rooftopper Youth Communities in Interaction with the Contemporary Megalopolis

Abstract

Can young bodies relate to the claustrophobic and oppressive hypertextual mega-cities of our world in a positive and transformational way? Michael Onfray postulates that reality paradoxically obeys a hidden principle of irreality. In this light, can irreality be made real, can even super-powers become real? Rooftopper and skywalker youth communities provide us with some clues. A subculture in urban exploration, they dedicate themselves to climbing tall buildings in order to walk and perform acrobatics on the edges of the tops of these buildings. They film and photograph their dangerous activities and upload them onto the web. Although there are nowadays important communities all over the world, these movements symptomatically began in countries ruled by oppressive governments. The Dare Devils and Angela Nikolau, for example, are Russian. This youth subculture will be analysed according to two frameworks. The first is that of post-Foucauldian theorists who, instead of biopower, postulate more updated concepts such as that of psychic political power, a hypersubtext ideologically dominant on the web. The second is that of the super-human condition, rather than that of the post-human, as a structuring element of these youth subcultures, for whom challenging death has become a means of (de)constructing subject formations.