"The sharpest part of my skeleton": Digital Surrealism, Weird Posthumanism, and Performing Theory.

Abstract

This talk identifies a body of WT accounts that he labels "digital surrealism": projections of a dark free flow of the Freudian id from such accounts as Post-Culture Review, Village Fetish, and Ketamine Stalin. Within this WT subgenre, Speaker 3 specifically focuses on digital surrealist tweets about skeletons. This image—often taking the form of reminding readers that they are sacks of meat encasing a skeleton (that might be trying to get out)—destabilizes humans’ understanding of themselves as stable beings. Aligning with an academic posthumanism seeking similar ends, the often gross, often funny imagery of “skeleton Twitter” better enacts this destabilization of human exceptionalism because it performs rather than merely theorizing this disruption. Speaker 3 concludes by gesturing toward the subversive engagement with surrealist practice in composition studies as a model for thinking more broadly about the electronic performance of theory.