I Wrote the Afterword to Aleš Čermák’s Book The Twin Ship Tao

Some time ago I went to see the theatre performance Superpozice at DUP39. It was written and directed by Aleš Čermák, at the time a doctoral student at the Faculty of Fine Arts (FaVU) in Brno. The whole thing made a big impression on me. Above all the visuals of the raw, austere set design, which I understood as the main medium of communication between the performance and the audience. Words were spoken in the performance, but they were not part of a coherent linear story. Instead, they struck me primarily as triggers of mental associations in the minds of the audience. Anyone who expected a narrative left the performance disappointed.

I, on the other hand, left pleasantly confused. As soon as I got home I sat down at my desk and wrote a short reflection on Facebook. Before long Aleš himself got in touch. The reflection had caught his interest, and after a short exchange of views he asked me whether I would be interested in contributing to a publication he was preparing. It was to contain the script of Superpozice and an afterword. It was the afterword that Aleš asked me to write. I could not say no. Besides, I thought that writing an afterword, and so a quasi-review and reflection, would help me get clearer about why Superpozice had struck me so much.

And so I wrote the afterword. Aleš Čermák wanted both the script of the performance and my afterword to be translated into English as well. The translation was taken care of by Vít Bohal, for which I am very grateful to him. He did a great job, and I could not have translated my own text better myself. Aleš and I then officially presented the book in Brno, at the venue Praha v Brně – see the event on GoOut.

So what did I write about in the afterword? Every work of art and every artist faces the problem of how to communicate what has not yet been said. The more original the work, the harder this communication is, for one cannot fall back on ordinary discourse and established terminology. There is nothing left, then, but to leave the confines of a linear and coherent story and to venture instead into a poetic and mythologising expression of ideas. The line between the prophetic proclamations of the Old Testament prophets and babbling at the level of word salad then becomes very thin. Aleš manages to stay on the boundary between these two opposite poles. It is up to the viewer or reader to use their intellect and emotions to create a linear narrative where there is none, and to grasp the prophetic proclamation about a sterile, seemingly post-apocalyptic world in which quotations from today’s great thinkers of speculative and posthumanist philosophy resonate.

In my afterword I focused on a word that appears several times in the script: surface. Superpozice urges us to look beneath the phenomenological surface of things and to glimpse the bubbling tangle of networked relations in which the world, in its primordial state, finds itself. Everything is connected: biology, culture, the material and the immaterial, gender roles, humans and technology. The surface is mere tinsel. Or, as the media theorist Marshall McLuhan would say, it is a juicy steak that distracts our attention from more important things. From what? From forms and structures, including how they come into being. If we look beneath the surface, we find that this interconnectedness of the world, though complex and beyond the intellect of any one of us, offers a potential source of the most important changes we may live to see in the 21st century and the centuries after. Donna Haraway, with her social reality and literary fiction in A Cyborg Manifesto, was in my view too superficial. And not in the pejorative sense, but in the sense that with her concept she did not go deep enough into the interconnectedness of the world. She stayed, as social scientists often do, with the social. That, however, is only one of many layers of our reality. And for me personally one of the more superficial ones, that is, the ones on the surface.

Gender, technology or media lie a good deal deeper, which makes them more interesting. The question is how exactly we will come to understand these depths of reality and in which direction our interventions will go. Are we closer to a utopian tomorrow? Or, on the contrary, are we approaching an apocalypse of biblical proportions in giant strides? In their article Cyborgs and space, the authors Kline and Clynes argued that it was time for us to take biological evolution into our own hands. This 1960 article, which incidentally introduced the word Cyborg for the first time, formed by joining cybernetic and organism, advocated steering human evolution for the purpose of travelling and surviving in extraterrestrial environments on other planets. This imperative, however, is entirely universal. Thanks to the interconnectedness of the world, the future is fundamentally open, and so is what it means to be human. Why do we all feel that it must end badly? Is humanity as an animal species too stupid to govern its own biology? Why are we so arrogant as to feel that we can manage it at all, when we are not even able to sort out the relations between men and women in society? The relationship between man and woman, and the fruits this relationship bears, are the beginning of humankind. If we do not quickly work out how to live together in modern society, it may also be its end.

These are the thoughts that Superpozice stirred in me, and these are the thoughts I developed in the afterword.

You can, for example, buy the book at the ArtMap bookshop.

Finally, on the back of the book there is a slightly edited excerpt from the afterword: