ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to bring into a productive conversation a philosophical conception of the flesh and the neoliberal post-industrial mediated formulation of the technological virtual. Using the phenomenological concept of the flesh as a structuring principle, Paromita Patranobish engages with the production of speculative bodies in Netflix’s in-house series Sense8. Patranobish examines how the body is posited as a site of questioning and destabilizing neoliberalism’s atrophying of subjectivity, and corporeality's emergence as a locus of materializing alternative possibilities for thinking about community, labour including artistic and creative labour, modes of inhabiting time and space, new forms of sensory and cognitive recalibration, and the shape of insurgent social solidarities. Patranobish’s analysis interrogates the limits of the model of corporeally and affectively realized sociality, shared consciousness, and radical empathy elaborated in the show, when juxtaposed in relation to a “grammar of transnationalism” employed by Netflix's in-house productions, and which in turn “can be translated and integrated into existing cultural conditions of a national media system” (Jenner 2018).
