Flickering Bodies

Posthuman Embodiment, Visibility and Power in Cassils' Becoming and Image

Abstract

This essay examines how Posthumanist theories of subjectivity are challenged and reconfigured through Cassils’ Becoming an Image (2012–ongoing). It begins with the observation that contemporary digital cultures increasingly frame the human subject as an informational pattern rather than an embodied agent, where visibility is assumed to be continuous, transparent, and reproducible. Against this assumption, the essay argues that Cassils’ performance introduces a condition of intermittent visibility that disrupts the link between seeing and knowing.

Through close analysis of the work’s structure — performed in darkness and revealed only through photographic flashes — the essay demonstrates that visibility is neither stable nor guaranteed but produced through sustained physical effort. Each image emerges from labour, exhaustion, and material resistance, making embodiment inseparable from the conditions of its appearance. In this way, the performance reveals the energetic and temporal cost of becoming visible, challenging the notion of frictionless digital representation.

The theoretical framework draws on the works of N. Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway to articulate two distinct yet complementary approaches within posthumanist thought. Hayles exposes the risks of reducing subjectivity to disembodied information, emphasising that such abstraction obscures the uneven distribution of vulnerability across bodies. Haraway, in turn, proposes the cyborg as a model for understanding embodiment as relational, hybrid, and politically situated within technological systems. Read together, these perspectives shift the focus from whether bodies persist to how they are mediated, regulated, and made legible.

The essay further situates Cassils’ work within the politics of archival visibility, showing how systems of documentation produce the conditions under which bodies become knowable. By separating reproducible photographic images from fleeting embodied perception, Becoming an Image exposes the limits of visual evidence and resists demands for stable legibility.

Ultimately, the essay argues that posthumanist frameworks reveal embodiment not as a stable given but as a contested process shaped by power, mediation, and material vulnerability. Cassils’ practice demonstrates that visibility is always grounded in labour and risk, insisting on the continued political significance of embodied life.