Mateusz Borowski – författare

This volume is a response to the growing need for new methodological approaches to the rapidly changing landscape of new forms of performative practices. The authors address a host of contemporary phenomena situated at the crossroads between science and fiction which employ various media and merge live participation with mediated hybrid experiences at both affective and cognitive level. All essays collected here move across disciplinary divisions in order to provide an account of these new tendencies, thus providing food for thought for a wide readership ranging from performative studies to the social sciences, philosophy and cultural studies.

The fundamental assumption behind the volume is that the current civilizational crisis, manifested in such phenomena as climate change, environmental catastrophes, pandemics and wars, puts into question the biopolitical means of optimizing the life of populations and individuals. To narrow down the thematic concerns of the volume, the chapters are centered around the notion of body, fundamental for the majority of theoretical takes on biopolitics. The volume shows that in the current age of catastrophes bodies are not only shaped and individualized through procedures of institutionalized discipline, but by an entanglement of environmental and planetary factors, typically omitted in extant accounts of biopolitics. The chapters go beyond biopolitics, because they show bodies as sites of operation of non-human or more-than-human agencies that work on scales inaccessible to human sensorium.