Thoughts on Metamorphosis
‘Watching a morph, at the same time i know it’s human ‘impossibility’ and strangeness, i also feel myself identifying with it - not with its narrative figure but with its figuration of corporeal process. my own body quickens to its effortless transformations at some deep molecular level, and i recognize the morph as strangely familiar; that is, i find myself in constant flux and become aware that i am never self identical… Furthermore in its achievement of radical change in time as materiality affixed to, and contained by, a concrete body or thing (however malleable), there is nothing quite so paradoxical as the sense the morph conveys that the ephemerality of flux and temporality and transformation are themselves undone.’ Vivian Sobchack
Yet with phenomenology there is a tendency, particularly when addressing the apparatus or its technologies, to align the process of the morph with the sublime…. What of the crisis of the body in transition? There is an existential element to consider as the body in metamorphosis rarely achieves transcendence. The morphed body, beyond and out of bounds, is the manifest opposition to physical logic and to enter into its realm is to become melancholic to that physicality.
just a note…..
