City Lights interviews Arthur Kroker

On BODY DRIFT and the work of Judith Butler, Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway.

Kroker_Body coverCity Lights: In the new book you open the discussion with the “haunting” of the media image machine by memories of the body. Genocide victims missing children, accident victims are evoked. Can you talk about the idea of “Drift”. What does it reveal about what is happening to us? What does it reveal about where we are headed both culturally and as a species?

Arthur Kroker: Body Drift is written at the trajectory of two opposing possibilities in contemporary culture. On the one hand, we are living in the shadows of a gathering political and social crisis in which technologies of abjection, disappearance, inertia, and substitution increasingly triumph. The evidence for this is pervasive: disappeared bodies, excluded ethnicities, prohibited sexualities, undocumented subjects, disavowed forms of imagination, hopes, and democratic aspirations. At the same time, the multiplicity of bodies that we are and the multiplicity of hopes that we engender begin to dream again of counter-trajectories of resistance, hope and solidarity. This moment of body drift is definitely global, pronounced, and truly enigmatic in its eventual outcomes. Indeed, the language of body drift in all its complexity, contingency, and hybridity has now come to define the key trajectories of posthuman culture.

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Published in: City Lights