Ontohackers redefines what movement, worlds, and bodies are through the sense of proprioception reconceptualized as formless fluctuation field, a movement matrix that is itself also thought, and which underlies all life forms and fields including the inorganic. Our worlds are made of endless such entangled fields n-folding in neverending variation or enferance. The current planetary crisis has emerged due to an accidental evolutionary alignment, narrowing, and impoverishment of that matrix’s indeterminacy, that appeared gradually and eventually with bipedalism, and which created an imbalance between the larger proprioceptive field and its brain, and made the atrophied body extend itself technically in geometric fields gradually covering the planet, along with its fears, with disastrous consequences that are unleashing an unprecedented type of mass extinction and species suicide.
For del Val, the reply to this crisis – which is urgently due if we are to reduce even slightly the collapse coming up over the next decades – is in recovering a lost sensorimotor plasticity which is also cognitive, affective, and relational plasticity, through developing movement technes for cultivating Body Intelligence (BI), reversing and taking elsewhere the failed evolution culminating in AI, stepping away from humanist-supremacist pedestals, undoing our dependency upon unsustainable killing machines of sedentary consumerism that impoverish experience, stopping the reproduction of a species that has become a plague (by reversing heteronormative reproductive dogmas until we reach pre-agricultural population levels), and recovering the joys of moving with the world, in symbiotic mutation, towards unprecedented evolutionary variations: this is our cosmic responsibility for all life on Earth.
The book’s structure expresses Enferance Theory with regard to how processes of becoming have a triple movement: an incipiency unfolding the field (Part I), a condensation-expansion where the field acquires full consistency (Part II), and a resonance or memory of the field relating to other fields (Part III).
Part I includes Books 1 to 3 out of seven books total. The preface sets the context of the book: the extinction crisis. Book 1 provides an introduction to the entire field of the book and reflects on the book’s structure and process. Book 2 is a full treatise on proprioception, developing the theory of Body Intelligence and addressing core issues of cognition, perception, communication, and an ontological redefinition of the body as proprioceptive swarm. Book 3 develops all core concepts of Radical Movement Philosophy, unfolding in several sections, first introducing fluctation, field, and swarm theory, secondly the core concepts of clinaos (indeterminacy), metabody (consistency), and intraduction (variation), all coming together in the concept of enferance. Finally, another triad further unfolds the previous triad as rhythm (affect), orientation (desire), and contact (sex), closing with an orgiastic cosmo-ontology that opens the way to Part II.
About the Author
Jaym*/Jaime del Val (or Jay Val, or Valjayk) is an artist-philosopher-activist, ontohacker-metaformer, and promoter of Metabody and Reverso. Since 2001, Del Val has been developing transdisciplinary projects at the fluid nexus of the convergence of the arts (performance, dance, media arts, visual arts, music, architecture), old and new technologies, and philosophy and activism. These projects have been presented in more than thirty countries on four continents, in many prestigious institutions (universities, festivals, museums), as well as in streets, refugee camps, squats, and jungles. A referent in postqueer metahumanism, Del Val has published over 120 essays, edited several journals, and organized over sixty international forums and conferences. As a queer and environmental activist, Del Val has led international initiatives. As a musician, they have recorded thirteen albums, and have also exhibited work as a visual artist. Del Val is neurodiverse, mestiza, non-binary microsexual, vegan, and trans-species, neither human nor cyborg, neither man nor woman, and is not on Facebook. After years traveling and living in cities, Del Val is now partly retiring with hir trans-species family to rural environments and nomadic living, developing technēs for Planetary Health, in preparation for becoming a naked gatherer in a forest, dancing until death arrives.