Condição Glitch – Da Falha Como Competência

Abstract

In a post-representational and post-digital era, the epistemological crisis suggested by Anthony Downey (2020), when considering the “inability of images to represent subjects and objects”, seems to disturb three important axes for the arts underlying an anthropocentric and dualistic metaphysics of presence: representation, subjectivity and visibility. I propose revisiting Peggy Phelan’s Ontology of Performance, by exploring disappearance as an alternative artistic tool to visual forms of representation, or co-presence when referring to performing arts. This kind of disappearance is undeniably influenced by post-humanist and object-oriented theories (from cyberfeminism to OOO and OOF), and welcomes the notion of glitch as ways of responding to unrepresentability when creating new subjectivities based on humans freed from the “world in their own image”. Glitch metaphysics is the strategy of disappearance made conscious by a post-humanist human, ontologically prepared to deal with the world-beyond-himself, where he co-exists with all objects. The fact that images can’t represent subjects or objects anymore is not a symptom of skills’ failure, it is symptom of failure as skill.