The Extracultural Becoming: Min Tanaka’s Synthanatic Dissolution
The Extracultural Becoming: Min Tanaka’s Synthanatic Dissolution

Summary/Abstract: This article examines Min Tanaka’s dance performed in the grounds of Koshikiiwa Temple (2015) as an enactment of extracultural becoming: a transgression of the boundaries of the human condition understood as a ‘cultured’ – that is, individualised, learned, structured, and brain-regulated – mode of existence, separated from the acultural flux of nature. In Tanaka’s septuagenarian body, the physiology of ageing is not resisted or corrected but lived as a willfully accepted departure from culturally enforced regimes of self-regulation. The phenomenological delinking of body and brain emerges here not as loss, but as a condition of transformation. Ageing, decay, and reabsorption of the body in the flux of circulating matter are thus refigured not through denial or sublimation, but as the fulfilment of transgressive impulses that give rise to a liminal mode of creation. This process entails the adoption of a symbiotic – ultimately synthanatic – condition, in which the constraints of cultural individuation are overcome, and the human body re-enters a field of relational, extracultural growth. The dance culminates in a synthanatic acceptance of death, understood not as negation but as reintegration into the continuous flux of biomaterial existence.

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