Browsing by Author "Hansen, Mark B N"

This dissertation makes a case that sexual difference, to date, has been a deeply misconceptualized philosophical concept. Too often reduced to only one expression of itself—the difference between the sexes—critiques of sexual difference as essentialist, heterosexist, transphobic, and race-blind are based on this limited definition of it as an identity category. Its scope, however, expands far beyond its anthropomorphic or human-centric expression and, I argue, it is only by opening up the concept as an ontology that we can begin to conceive new, nuanced, philosophically-grounded ways out of sexist, racist, transphobic, capitalistic and colonialist metaphysics whose roots run so deep that their foundational frameworks are often left unchallenged. This requires stretching sexual difference from an epistemological project that centers “the knower,” often “Woman,” to an ontological framework that constitutes the condition of possibility for epistemology itself. In other words, sexual difference is not reducible to the sex of the knowing subject but founds the logic that there are always at least two ways of knowing, thinking, and being that are irreducible to, or non-collapsible into each other. An ontology of sexual difference requires moving beyond the concept’s historical basis in feminist critiques of psychoanalysis, and even beyond feminist theory itself, where—in its current form—it remains trapped in a tired and boring binary debate between social constructivists and new materialists.

A Meta-Physics of Sexual Difference aims for a way out of this dualism within feminist theory by proposing sexual difference as the organizing, incorporeal principle of reality itself. Open-ended throughout—neo-finalist rather than teleological—this takes sexual difference further than it has ever been taken before—beyond its role as the engine of evolution proliferating life, even beyond inciting the emergence of life itself from non-living matter. Sexual difference, if it is to be a truly revolutionary metaphysics or first philosophy, must begin from the very beginning, with the origins of space-time For this reason, this project engages deeply and seriously with contemporary physics, and in the spirit of Irigaray, has both critical and creative components.

The first half critiques contemporary Western physics for its unconscious but undergirding phallocentrism—an unacknowledged commitment to a logic of replicating self-sameness, containment, and unification. This is most palpable in the practically unanimous desire to unify all the “self-contained” structures of physical reality—from the smallest subatomic particles to the large-scale cosmological universe itself—into a totalizing “theory of everything.” Doing this, however, would require solving for “quantum gravity,” the biggest challenge the field faces today. It implies overcoming the logical contradiction at the heart of physics—the incompatibility between two theories of nature—general relativity, which governs large and very massive structures, and quantum mechanics, which governs small and light structures. Our best current theory for gravity—Einstein’s general relativity—refers to the curvature of space-time on which quantum fields emerge, but it cannot, and has never been quantized itself. Ever-elusive and enigmatic, quantum gravity is a feminine symptom that seems to situate itself at the boundaries between the physical and the meta-physical, i.e., what is before the Big Bang, above the speed of light, below the Plank scale, and inside black holes. Posed at these thresholds, we may begin to think of quantum gravity as the interval itself.

It is precisely here, in the second half of the dissertation, that sexual difference stages its constructive intervention. As a logic of co-constitutive “twoness,” it emphasizes the relation from which two things emerge rather than trying to enclose two things into one container. Applying this to the “incompatibility” between general relativity and quantum mechanics, I propose embryogenesis, a philosophical concept borrowed from Raymond Ruyer, as a new “model” for physical reality that emerges only by beginning from this different logic or meta-physics for physics: sexual difference rather than phallocentrism. As the condition of possibility for physics, meta-physics itself is the maternal-feminine par excellence, opening physics and feminist theory to an ontological alliance via sexual difference. “Embryogenesis” could be conceived of as an alternative framework to the “theory of everything” for physicists to take up in the future, which may even change the way the problem of quantum gravity is conceptualized. In embryogenesis, quantum reality is not stuffed inside our gravitational universe as it is framed by the epistemological Copenhagen formulation that centers the observer. Inversely, this proposal relies on the only ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics that exists—Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds. Many-worlds theory makes the case that fundamental quantum reality is a Hilbert space in which our universe is represented by a quantum mechanical wave-function that decoheres—splits or branches or sexuates—each time the self-entanglement of the system as a whole evolves. Hilbert space is therefore the “quantum womb” within which our embryonic universe makes itself by evolving and expanding the local geometry of space-time. Quantum gravity, in this context, may be the interval between realms that nourishes this process of embryogenesis, perpetually self-differentiating the realms from each other, but also supplying their mutual growth and development, by crossing the threshold from the non-local, virtual, “in-formational,” or trans-spatial maternal matrix into our gravitational universe and converting itself into the mysterious “dark energy” that supplies the ongoing growth and development of its structuration.

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) was founded on the conviction that in order to make computers more advanced, it was necessary to build them to be more human. Adopting the human form as the blueprint for computer systems allowed AI researchers to imagine and construct computer systems capable of feats otherwise unimaginable for machines. As the institutions and professional boundaries of the field have evolved over the past 70 years, they have at times obscured the figure of the human at the heart of AI work. However, in moments of heightened optimism, when researchers permit themselves to speculate on the fantastic futures AI technologies will one day enable, it is inevitably to this figure that the field returns, forever striving to resolve that originary question of just what is the nature of this human intelligence the field has so long pursued?

In this dissertation, I trace the emergence of the figure of the human at the center of AI work. I argue that the human at the center of the imaginary of AI is rooted in a deeper impulse---that of envisioning not machines that think, but machines that speak. It is language that most fundamentally defines the original ambition of AI work and the inability to conceptualize language apart from the human that draws the field inevitably back to this figure. With language properly at the center of its project, AI becomes a study not of the physical world but of the narrative universe, not of the biological human being but of literary character, not of machinic intelligence but of machinic personhood.

Drawing on the history of AI's entanglements with language, I argue for a reconceptualization of the project of AI around a vision of language not as an encoding of solitary thought but as a collection of shifting social practices that allow human and non-human intelligences to navigate their shared worlds despite their irreducibly alien cognitive realities. Such a reorientation, I contend, makes room for a broader vision of AI work that joins critical and technical practices in the shared project of grappling with the question of what it means to be human.

In the context of today's global mobility, information, bodies and goods are circulating across the globe, and even further into outer space. However, we face a paradox: the more we move, the more we become sedentary. The modes of transportation that enable our global mobility are working against us, insidiously dwindling our psycho-physical mobility. Globalization is thus not the world becoming bigger (or too big), but the world becoming immobile. Taking the body as the central non-place of political space, Architectures of Aliveness: Building Beyond Gravity interrogates the possibility of inhabiting circulation as a pragmatic form of resistance to the contemporary immobilization of life. In an era in which bodies and goods are ever more constantly in global circulation, architectures of aliveness ask, what would an experience of weightlessness do for us?

Biotechnology serves as the current dominant model for enlivening architecture and the mobility of its inhabitants. Architectures of aliveness invert the inquiry to look instead at outer space's modules of inhabitation. In questioning the possibility of making circulation inhabitable --as opposed to only inhabiting what is stationary--architectures of aliveness problematize architecture as a form of biomedia production in order to examine its capacity to impact psychic and bodily modalities toward an intensification of health. Problematized synchretically within life's mental and physical polarization, health is understood politically as an accretion of our capacity for action instead of essentially as an optimization of the biological body. The inquiry emerges at the intersection of biotechnology, neurosciences, outer space science and technology, and architecture. The analysis oscillates between historical and contemporary case studies toward an articulation that concentrates on contemporary phenomena while maintaining an historical perspective. The methodology combines archival research, interviews, and artistic and literary analysis. The analysis is informed by scientific research. More precisely, the objective is to construct an innovative mode of thinking about the fields of exchangeability between arts and sciences beyond a critique of instrumentality.

The outcomes suggest that architectures of aliveness are architectures that invite modes of inhabitation that deviate from habitualized everyday spatial engagements. It also finds that the feeling of aliveness emerges out of the production of analog or continuous space where the body is in relation with space as opposed to be represented in it. The analysis concludes that the impact of architecture on our sense of wellbeing is conditioned by proprioceptive experiences that are at once between vision and movement and yet at the same time in neither mode, suggesting an aesthetic of inhabitation based on our sense of weightedness and weightlessness.

These outcomes are thus transduced to the field of media studies to enchant biomediatic inquiry. Proposing a renewed definition of biomedia that interprets life as a form of aesthetic relation, architectures of aliveness also formulate a critique of the contemporary imperialism of visualization techniques. Architectures of aliveness conclude by questioning the political implications of its own method to suggest opacity and agonistic spaces as the biomediatic forms of political space.

Border Images and Imaginaries: Spectral Aesthetics and Visual Media of Americanity at the U.S.-Mexico Border, proposes an emerging aesthetic of spectrality in visual media about the U.S.-Mexico border that challenges the power of militarized and racialized visibility. The visual media projects I work with, including cinema, electronic performance art, site specific video installation, and photography generate an aesthetic of spectrality as they try to conjure and express the socially invisible through sensual elements like affect, sound, kinaesthetics, and full embodiment. This aesthetic elicits the perceptions of our other senses beyond only the visual and makes visible the social flesh of the movements and socialities of migration rather than racialized, migrant bodies. The border, I claim, is an important site for understanding the continued deployment of visibility in the neoliberal legacies of what Quijano and Wallerstein call, Americanity, a term denoting the development of the modern capitalist system in the Americas which relied upon the imbricate logics of colonialism, racism, and the deification the modern. Images of spectrality are intermediaries between what Diana Taylor calls, archive and repertoire, being both documents and sites of embodied engagement that produce both certain and uncertain knowledges of race and migration at the border. The visual media projects in my dissertation cultivate spectral aesthetics to theorize an alternative visibility and the changing production of public memory. By making visible the social flesh of heterogeneous encounters with media, spectral aesthetics reforms collective memory making it a process of democratic editorialization that privileges experience as the site of a multivocal history. This project reclaims the image as a terrain for the multitude's inquiry and imagination about the US-Mexico border, and puts the imaginaries generated by these images in dialog with activist projects happening in relation to immigration.

The advent and generalization of digital computing machines in the twentieth century spelled a wholesale revolution in communication technologies. As with every technological revolution, this one came irreducibly co-involved with transformations in the economic sphere. In the latter half of the twentieth century, this meant financialization, which comprised an exponential expansion in the size and power of finance, a reversal in preeminence between the “real” and the financial economy, and the saturation of an increasing proportion of social processes with financial logics and evaluative criteria. None of these developments would have been possible without digital computers. This dissertation, Cash Flows: A Media Archeology of Financial Engineering, 1958-1987, details the involution between late-twentieth century finance and digital media, demonstrating that to understand finance, we must understand the digital, and to understand the digital, we must understand finance.Financialization and the computerization of finance can be accounted for, I show, under the rubric of financial engineering, a distinct mode of financial operation that emerged beginning in 1958. Financial engineering combines a novel conceptual scheme with novel technologies. The conceptual scheme, no-arbitrage, takes over for earlier neoclassical understandings of economic and financial operation based on equilibrium; it shifts the responsibility for the maintenance of “true” prices from the counterbalancing forces of spontaneous rational actors to the concerted efforts of financial theorists. Concomitantly, I show, it uses digital computers to transform financial theory from a post facto, empirical, and descriptive venture to an ex ante, speculative, and constructive one. Financial theory becomes a real-time data processing operation. Drawing on media theory and the philosophy of technology and updating the foundational account of human-machine interaction offered by the French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon, Cash Flows offers a way to understand how media transformation drove financialization, what financialization tells us about media transformation, and what consequences we should expect from the continued generalization of digital technologies. The revolution of the digital, as I detail, involves a profound change in the relationship between machines and symbols. Rather than simply reproducing symbols—a capacity machines had possessed since at least the fifteenth century—digital machines operationalized them. As Cash Flows argues, the fundamental factor in last century’s financial transformation was the newfound ability of machines to transform symbols into actions. Digital computers enabled finance to machinically operationalize social and subjective processes humans carry out as a matter of course. Concomitantly, then, the saturation an increasing proportion of social processes by digital media is equally finance’s conquest of the social. All the consequences we see within the finance narrowly defined—from the construction of totalizing interconnection between elements that had previously been understood as belonging to separate spheres; to the transformation of psychic and social flows into value-generating data streams; to the enlistment of the human as a co-processor of digital data; to more frequent, more widely ranging, and more severe crises amplified by feedback loops between humans and machines—are equally the social consequences of digitization.

In 1949, Bell Lab mathematician Claude Shannon modeled telephone communication by assigning statistic regularity to the rather irregular usage of human language. His lab mate Warren Weaver took a step further, putting the novel Alice in Wonderland through a translation machine in pursuit of a unified form of intercultural communication. Amidst the ideological polarities of the Cold War, this rationalist pursuit was idealistic. Yet today it still guides the scholarly approach to intercultural communication. This approach to data analysis poses a problem: the corporate sector simply has far superior systems of aggregating data and manipulating information, while individual academics would either have to ally with the world’s most popular social media or be forever trapped in isolation and by deficits. My work, on the contrary, focuses on the advantages of studying deficits. It questions why and how details are deliberately stripped out, why and how experience is transformed into algorithmic power, all for creating the impression of mere “data.”

This dissertation has two main objectives, one inwardly focused, the other outwardly oriented: first, to create a dialogue between literary studies and media studies through discussions of informational loss; second, to shift the narrow focus of North American and German media theory by drawing broadly on the material history of literature, media, and art from modern and contemporary China. China studies, a field born out of Cold War contexts in the West, have thus far developed under the growing pressure to track the particularities of this cultural other like China, without paying much attention to what documents are doing to a history rife with deliberately omitted information. This dissertation rectifies this mistreatment of lost details. Targeting communication scholar Marshall McLuhan’s provocation that “the medium is the message,” we may say that what is missing is the message; preserving what is missing in a cultural other end up making us not see China at all.

How do we approach objects that are opaque and always disappearing from view? This study locates this issue at the intersection of media theory and literary theory through reviewing key historical moments in both fields: this study examines the archival compression of the historical figure and the corpus called “Lu Xun” (1881-1936) to rethink the destructive role of print media in constructing Chinese modernity; returns to the industrial production of “books to lose” in the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960) to rethink the inevitable, functional bias of preservation in historiography; reviews the 1980s’ indulgence in a kind of “information fetishism” to reveal that opacity, too, can be a political ideal; and evaluates the claim of China’s 5G and AI “authoritarian networks” to expose the problematic metaphors of informatics. Each of the four chapters draws on literary and artistic texts, including Lu Xun’s untranslated essays (chapter 1), Yan Lianke’s fictional historiographies (chapter 2), Liu Cixin’s politicized science fiction (chapter 3), and emerging media arts in China (chapter 4). Referring to what tends to be hidden by acts of collecting, what becomes opaque, and what gets erased when the technological context is neglected, I borrow the term “lossy” from computer science. This term circumvents the notion of history based on static archives and their imaginary solidity. Interweaving two distinct threads of exposition (media studies and literature), this dissertation provides a multi-fold narrative about history, politics, and China.

This dissertation disputes the notion of a decline in human agency, which is taken as a theoretical article of faith in many threads of post- and anti-human literatures concerned with the effects of technical networking and computation on society. Its central contention is that the notion of “the death of authorship” is based on a false construction of political authority and individual subjecthood, and that the concept of decision developed during the Western Enlightenment continues to exert an outsized discursive influence on our conceptions of human being (via liberal subjectivity) and state power (sovereignty). Because such discourses share an understanding of decision as something concentrated in an individual, issues that transcend the scope of localized human perception are often considered outside the purview of human agency, ultimately resulting in an abdication of collective human responsibility. Despite never having truly articulated interpersonal and political relations, the figure of the sovereign subject is reified by twenty-first century discourses that claim to have transcended it. The work accomplishes this critique through a combination of arts-based research and theoretical argumentation, developing notions of ‘collectivity’ and ‘improvisation’ as central to human decision and agency, while casting the sovereign subject as the lingering particularity of a specific time in the history of Western political thought. It concludes, first, that understandings of human subjectivity as always already interrelated—intersubjectivity—allows theory to better model and understand political phenomena in the age of networked, generative aesthetics and, secondly, that such understandings may provide avenues toward a notion of collective responsibility for novel approaches to problems considered outside the limited purview of individual subjecthood.

Media studies today is a rapidly evolving discipline, with diverse and sundry emphases. Media alternately refers to specific objects and apparatuses (film, television, radio, video games, virtual reality, etc.), positions (mass media, new media, social media, fandom), and methods (theoretical, communications and rhetoric-based, social scientific). Media is in danger of becoming a word that means everything, and thus means nothing.

This dissertation configures a theoretical intervention that returns to the central question of what media means, positing a new, internal structure for media on the basis of reading (re-)mediation as primordial computivity and selection. In so doing, we establish a novel coherence for media studies through the construction of a computer- scientifically inspired "hypervisor," which entails a relativism that does not require choosing between alternate approaches yet refuses to erase distinctions. Through an interdisciplinary approach we combine resources from set theory, media theory, Continental philosophy, computer science, and linguistics to reposition the analysis of media's external, social effects on the basis of its newly discovered internal coherence, that of primordial computivity.

Confronting the rapidly increasing, worldwide reliance on biometric technologies to surveil, manage, and police human beings, my dissertation Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement charts a series of queer, feminist, and anti-racist concepts and artworks that favor opacity as a means of political struggle against surveillance and capture technologies in the 21st century. Utilizing biometric facial recognition as a paradigmatic example, I argue that today's surveillance requires persons to be informatically visible in order to control them, and such visibility relies upon the production of technical standardizations of identification to operate globally, which most vehemently impact non- normative, minoritarian populations. Thus, as biometric technologies turn exposures of the face into sites of governance, activists and artists strive to make the face biometrically illegible and refuse the political recognition biometrics promises through acts of masking, escape, and imperceptibility. Although I specifically describe tactics of making the face unrecognizable as "defacement," I broadly theorize refusals to visually cohere to digital surveillance and capture technologies' gaze as "informatic opacity," an aesthetic-political theory and practice of anti- normativity at a global, technical scale whose goal is maintaining the autonomous determination of alterity and difference by evading the quantification, standardization, and regulation of identity imposed by biometrics and the state. My dissertation also features two artworks: Facial Weaponization Suite, a series of masks and public actions, and Face Cages, a critical, dystopic installation that investigates the abstract violence of biometric facial diagramming and analysis. I develop an interdisciplinary, practice-based method that pulls from contemporary art and aesthetic theory, media theory and surveillance studies, political and continental philosophy, queer and feminist theory, transgender studies, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies.

Maintenance Works: The Aesthetics and Politics of Collective Support investigates the cultural visibility and value of maintenance labor through a critical examination of American visual and material culture, post-1969. Starting from the visual and performance practice of self-proclaimed “maintenance artist” Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her Manifesto For Maintenance Art 1969!, I develop a conceptual definition of maintenance as sustaining activity that occurs across scales, from the intimate labor of caring for bodies, to the collective, macro-scale problems of sustaining infrastructures and environments. I argue that, with the gesture of assigning her own and others’ maintenance labor the status of “artwork”, Ukeles prompts a critical re-valuation of the visibility and social and economic value of maintenance that resonates with a host of historical and contemporary discourses on the gendered and stratified distribution of material and social reproduction, including Marxist-feminist approaches to care work, critiques of innovation discourse in science and technology studies, and concern with issues of social and economic precarity in recent cultural criticism and critical theory. At the center of both Ukeles’ project and these discussions lie important questions about the status, conditions, and social distribution of care and support: Who is doing it? How does it get done? How does it feel to maintain or be maintained? What happens when practices and structures of social and material support fail, whether through immediate crisis or prolonged neglect? How do those affected find ways of maintaining otherwise? Each chapter of Maintenance Works approaches these questions by examining the visual and material culture around what I define as late 20th-century “crises of maintenance”: shifting economies of care and support, global environmental destruction, and institutionalized abandonment and neglect. The cultural objects I discuss span decades and genres, including land and environmental art, feminist and queer performance, and social practice. Through these material case studies I add important theoretical and cultural foundation to contemporary discussions on care, precarity, and sustainability across disciplines from queer and feminist theory to eco-critical humanities, to science and technology studies, and center the production and reception of artwork as sites for critical inquiry and knowledge production.

This dissertation argues that critical practices in the expanded field of art, technology, and space illustrate the potential of twenty-first century media by materializing depths of our experiential dimensions. Scholarship on digital embodiment and materialism in art, media studies, and aesthetics has paid much attention to the central role played by the human body in contemporary media environments. Grounded in these studies, however, this study moves forward to understand the more fundamental quality that grounds and conditions the experience of the human body—namely depth.

Drawing on diverse disciplines, such as art history, visual studies, media studies, critical theory, phenomenology, and aesthetics, this study provides a reconstruction of the notion of depth to unpack the complex dimensionality of human experiences that are solicited by different critical spatial practices. As a spatial medium that produces the body subject and the world through the process of intertwining, depth points to an environmental affordance that prepares or conditions the ways in which the body processes the information in the world. The dimension of depth is not available to natural human perception. However, incorporating twenty-first century media that are seamlessly embedded in physical environments, critical spatial practices sensibly materialize the virtual dimensions of depth by animating space in a way that is different from the past.

This dissertation provides comprehensive analyses of these critical spatial practices by artists who create constructed situations that bring the experiential dimensions of depth to the fore. The acknowledgement of depth allows us to understand the spatialities of bodies and their implication in the vaster worldly spatiality. In doing so, this study attends to major contemporary philosophical and aesthetic challenges by reframing the body as the locus of subjectivity that is always interdependent upon broader sociocultural and technological environments.

This dissertation contends that sound and aurality ought to be more fully integrated into how gender and sexuality are thought. The dissertation’s title, “Partial Figures,” refers to its aims: not to exhaustively document the status of sound within discourses of sexual difference and dissidence, but rather to sketch how queer and feminist thought might draw on sound’s resources. The project is thus situated within the longer trajectory of visual approaches to power and gender. “Partial Figures” also describes what I suggest are sound and aurality’s specific erosion of the figure as a presumptive requirement of approaches to social life and aesthetic form. By partial, I mean both incomplete and nonunitary, subject to the decay and growth, the putative disfigurement, that Hortense Spillers describes under the rubric of flesh. Finally, the notion of being partial, as opposed to impartial, is also at play. Partiality -- having a weakness for something – describes an orientation that bridges affection and dependency or debility; it compromises aesthetics as a site for the exercise of judgement. To be partial to something or someone is to be rendered incomplete by that thing, a torsion or disfigurement that marks queer and feminist method. By considering notions of musical flavor and corporeality (Chapter 1), queer sound ecologies (Chapter 2), and gendered ontologies of frequency and vibration (Chapter 3), I revisit key conceptual knots within theories of gender and sexuality that require a more sustained attention to sound and aurality.

I focus on two fundamental preoccupations within queer and feminist scholarship that, I argue, are reconfigured by the methodological, material, and historical resources of sound: corporeality (Chapter 1) and ecology (Chapter 2). From this assessment of sound’s essential resources for theories of gender and sexuality, Chapter 3 then moves, through a consideration of sexual difference as noise, to suggest that sonic ontologies likewise cannot properly be thought without queer and feminist method.

The first chapter concerns corporeality as a principal site of feminist theory’s turn to questions of matter and affect in the 2000s. For some influential theorists, I argue, an ambiguous and overdetermined relationship between food, fatness, and “epidemic” debility became a cipher for the specifically causative or agential powers of matter and affect. I show, however, that these powers have already been thought otherwise in the overlapping contexts of black studies and musicology. I take up notions of musical flavor and culinary sound in the work of Fred Moten and Theodor Adorno, respectively, alongside Hortense Spillers’ account of ungendered flesh as resisting figuration in the sense of both embodiment and (ac)counting. Like fatness, musical flavor is felt as the distension and elaboration of form and enjoyment, its aesthetic and figural enrichments taken for a failure to budget and apportion pleasure, need, and dependency. Within feminism’s turn toward corporeal matter, I argue, fatness and food have been made to serve as both a hinge and an impasse. On the one hand, the purported links between eating, fatness, and debility have been taken as the very image of self-evident causation. On the other hand, however, fatness troubles etiology, generating endless (and to date, inconclusive) speculation about what causes it and how its alleged social pathology might be reversed. Its status as a site of commingled growth and purported decay, life and “premature” death or debility, has presented itself to some writers as an apparent conundrum. In addition to Moten, Adorno, and Spillers, I draw on critiques of causality by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Michel Foucault. The nonopposition of growth and decay, life and debility, enjoyment and dependency, emerges through music and artworks by Future, UGK, Anicka Yi, Alvin Lucier, and Constantina Zavitsanos, among others.

Chapter 2 concerns a second historically vexed site for thinking gender and sexuality: nature and ecology. I approach the relation between sex, ecology, and sound through one of queer theory’s founding preoccupations: “public,” outdoor, or undomestic sexual gathering. “Public sex” has been imagined as a question of sightlines and their obstruction, but I argue that its sociality is given form by acoustics and acute sensitivity to environmental sound in spaces where visual obscurity offers both protection and danger. I read the 1998 album Second nature: an electro-acoustic pastoral, produced from field recordings of a parkland cruising ground by the group Ultra-red, who develop an audio ecology of this queer sexual commons alongside a critique of the pastoral as a site of musical and ecological containment. Works by Samuel Delany, Simon Leung, June Jordan, Park McArthur, Lorraine O’Grady, TLC, and others situate Ultra-red’s Second nature within an understanding of a sexual commons that views need and dependency as forms of ecological wealth.

Chapter 3 considers noise as a figure for feminine sexual difference, suggesting that ontologies of sound must be conditioned by queer and feminist thought. My argument proceeds through an account of chatter, frequency, and perpetual motion, considering Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” chatbots, gifs, David Lynch’s 2006 film Inland Empire, consciousness-raising, and the work of artists Jessica Vaughn, Amber Hawk Swanson, and Pauline Oliveros. Questions of frequency and vibration have emerged as part of sonic ontologies in recent years; I trace the entry of vibration and “vibes” into U.S. popular discourse in the early 20th century through the theological and musicological writing of Sufi Inayat Khan. Among his areas of influence, I focus on the history of modern dance, particularly its Orientalist preoccupation with the animated wave-forms of loose fabric, which was demonstrably molded by Khan’s theories of vibration. This racially and sexually marked “signature” gesture was the subject of several intellectual property lawsuits that sustained legal ambiguity about the status of performance as property.

Plastic Recognition traces a critical genealogy of the human face in cinema and its afterlives. By rethinking the history of film theory through its various investments in the face, it seeks to intervene not only in the discipline of film studies but more broadly within contemporary political and scientific discourse. This dissertation contends that the face is a privileged site for thinking through the question of recognition, a concept that cuts across a range of aesthetic, political, philosophical, and scientific thought. Plastic Recognition examines this intimate link between the face and recognition through a return to "classical" film theory, and specifically to the first generation of European and Soviet film theorists' preoccupation with the face in silent cinema. In the process, it recasts the canonical debate over cinematic specificity between Béla Balázs and Sergei Eisenstein as an antagonism between two opposing conceptions of the face in film: transparent universalism versus plastic typicality. Of these two conceptions, this project contends that the "Balázsian" idea of a transparently expressive face assumes cultural dominance in the latter half of the 20th century by virtue of its essential commensurability with the political and social ideal of mutual recognition that has come to prevail in the United States and Western Europe in the context of neoliberalism. Alongside and against this dominant tendency, the "Eisensteinian" insistence upon the plasticity of aesthetic form provides a radical alternative to the idealist metaphysics of immediacy underlying both the "Balázsian" notion of the cinematic face and the ideal of mutual recognition it exemplifies. That insistence forces into view the ways that recognition itself is always contingent upon aesthetic and technological practices, even (or especially) when it is brokered by that seemingly most immediate of images--the human face. By adopting this approach as its basic critical orientation, this dissertation attempts to restage the problem of recognition as fundamentally about the historicity of plastic form. The project concludes by turning to a scientific scene of recognition in which the "Balázsian" conception of the face makes an uncanny reappearance. The final chapter examines several studies in contemporary neuroscience that use representations of the human face as experimental stimuli in an effort to establish a neurophysiological basis for the mutual recognition of empathy.

The dissertation explores the cultural archive of the Soviet cybernetics, computer science, and popular science fiction to see how they all contributed to a distinct “trustful” image of the computer. As interdisciplinary research originating during the Second World War in the USA, cybernetics sought to understand human nature in terms of man-machine metaphors. Within the Western context, cybernetic metaphors dethroned the human from the center of the universe and blurred the distinction between natural and artificial (or technological). Although cybernetics failed to establish itself as an academic discipline in the USA, its influence has been profound and its aftereffects can still be registered today both in academic discussions on digital media and posthumanism and broader cultural mythologies regarding AI takeover and evil machines (be it the Terminator and The Matrix franchises or replicants from Blade Runner). In contrast, the USSR, while having enthusiastically adopted cybernetic ideas and metaphors, didn’t see technology as an existential threat but rather a tool of self-discovery and as a friend who invites for an ethical dialogue.

The dissertation draws upon Michel Foucault and media archaeology and reconstructs the cultural episteme of the computer which is characterized by the fundamentally mathematical understanding of digital technologies, where mathematics not only framed human-computer interaction but, in so doing, “defused” man-machine analogies which were at the origin of the figure of the cyborg in American culture.

The dissertation thus contributes to contemporary debates in comparative media studies. By drawing on the French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon, the dissertation argues that digital media inaugurate a new stage in the evolution of technology. If the development of industrial technology is conditioned by the potentialities of matter and physical world, digital technologies explore the potentialities of operative representations encapsulated in programming languages, computer abstractions, and interfaces. Since operative representations serve to communicate with both humans and machines, in the case of digital technologies, the cultural is embedded withing the technological. The entwinement of the cultural and the technological accounts for the differences not only in the public image of the computer but also in scientific research, like, for instance, in the case of the AI research used as a case study in the dissertation.

This dissertation is an attempt to explain art in the 21st century by an artist/researcher. It is a theoretical writing on art informed by current discourses that influence art such as science and technology. There are two goals of this project. The first one is to understand art’s cultural role in the age of the anthropocene. What is the anthropocene? How does art’s role in society change in this particular geological epoch (following Crutzen’s definition), compared to for instance Holocene? This brings us to the second goal of my project. To better understand art’s role in society, can we benefit from a theory of art, that could present an insight on the dynamics within an artistic experience? What are the current tools and tendencies that can help form such a theory of art? Which fields can contribute to such an understanding?

As an instance of artistic research practice which involves both academic research and art practice, I will be using art projects as case studies to reach these goals. Case studies will consist of my own projects as well as projects by other artists who had been working on similar topics such as Edward Burtynsky, Chris Jordan, Louis Bec, Trevor Paglen, Patricia Piccinini and Lynn Hershmann to name a few. From Timothy Morton to Mackenzie Wark to Donna Haraway cultural theorists of our time, highlight the fact that there is a need for a cultural theory that can attend to what we might call the anthropocene. What is the contribution of art for such a theory? Or can art be instrumental in building a cultural theory at all? My dissertation offers a multi-disciplinary argument for the need to address such questions . Starting from art’s roots in biology and extending to what we might call our biological imagination, the dissertation focuses on art’s connection to biology to initiate a formula for art in the age of the anthropocene.

Technics Before Time: Experiencing Rationalism and the Techno-Aesthetics of Speculation proposes a philosophy of technicity, or a theory of what it means for tools, techniques, and technologies—or simply technics—to be technical. Logically anterior to the everyday utility of technical objects as well as to the notion of technics as prosthetics for human faculties, technicity is a category that allows me to elaborate diverse and creative participations in technical existences without presupposing an essentialist or techno-determinist ideology. Whereas other philosophies of technics delimit technicity to a presupposed range of what a technical object can be, I attend to the structures and processes that define a technical reinvention of reality. This opens the technical, including the human’s participation in it, well beyond both extensions of physical laws of nature (à la Gilbert Simondon) and consciously liveable memories (à la Bernard Stiegler).

The dissertation has eight chapters organized into three parts, each with their own case study from popular culture that both exemplifies and challenges the theoretical arguments. Part One examines how effects pedals used by electric guitarists, known as “stomp boxes,” mediate sound across layered orders of magnitude and otherwise incommensurable domains of phenomena. This clarifies the superpositional structure of intentional acts in Stiegler’s underdeveloped notion of technics as “organized inorganic matter”; and it undermines Simondon’s exclusion of human and cultural aesthetic values from the physico-chemical functioning intrinsic to technics. Part Two moves to the domain of technical subjects, specifically the creative thought process by which transcendental phenomenology linguistically constructs concepts to explain worldly genesis anterior to all objectification. German philosopher Eugen Fink’s speculative critique of phenomenology foregrounds the written performance of conceptualizing the pre-conscious creation of horizons of experience, which finds a pop cultural analogy in the rules systems, instruments of play, and collective world building in tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Pushing Stiegler’s technical critique of phenomenology to its logical denouement, I convert transcendental subjectivity into a transcendental technicity that integrates human thought into a broader, distributed field of technical cognition. Part Three finalizes the formulation of technicity proper, not just its objective and subjective forms, with a speculative theory of invention that pertains to material processes at a general, neutral level anterior to their sociocultural and conscious integration. On the theoretical side, I deploy Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy to fill out the systematic categorization of technicity so that it obtains maximum applicability to actually existing technics. On the techno-aesthetic side, I levy my novel perspective against the intuitive interpretation that blood and gore in computer games represent violence. Instead, analyzed according to the technical form of the game, gore functions first and foremost as a non-mimetic operator of a computational structure that exists through a human player’s participation.

The dissertation therefore intervenes into two broadly conceived trajectories of media theory: the prosthetic interpretation of technical media and the media-specific analysis of nonhuman phenomena. My elaboration of technicity provides an explanation of how each trajectory correctly understands its target phenomena according to its presupposed domain of abstraction. Understanding technicity as a generic process of material invention offers a productive alternative to recent speculative philosophies that oppose the human to the nonhuman. Instead, it specifies the idea of technics in relation to the more general notion of the medium as a ground for particular existences, and it recognizes the inseparability of rational concept and the sensible particularities of experience. To the extent that the human, in its experience and social organization, is technically constituted, grasping technics at such a philosophically general level can expand the disciplinary range and creative potential of the humanities.

This dissertation explores the limits of feminist theory in terms of what questions it can address, and does this by reimagining the relation feminist theory and late nineteenth and twentieth-century continental thought can have with scientific research concerning the origins of life. I argue that a phallocentric scientific and theoretical framework—in which one term, one mode of being, is privileged and becomes the “universal” at the expense of all others—is incapable of addressing the emergence of life out of matter on Earth. A phallocentric theory of the origin of life posits a hierarchy between life and matter and understands them as fundamentally opposite to each other. In such a framework, life and matter are always external to one another, and matter is denigrated at the expense of life. In creating a division between matter and life, phallocentric approaches to the origins of life create a dilemma for themselves because they need to pinpoint exactly when life emerges, in other words they need to answer and explain exactly when “inanimate” matter is animated or penetrated with a logos of life. Building on the feminist science studies tradition that examines the relation between metaphor and science, The Conditions of Emergence studies how certain strands of origins of life research are beginning to question whether scientific work rooted in metaphors of light, energetic stasis, and autonomous self-birth can attend to the question of how cellular life first emerged from matter somewhere between 3.8 and 4.2 billion years ago. In lieu of these metaphors, theories of origin concentrating on deep-sea vents re-embed life’s cellular beginnings within a geochemically volatile ancient Earth through metaphors of darkness (rather than light) and gestational birth in inorganic wombs (rather than within narratives where a cellular body brings itself into being). I argue that thinking about and trying to conceptualize a dark proto-intrauterine space that is bioenergetically never at rest and rooted within the geochemical forces of the Earth as the origins of cellular life generates, perhaps for the first time, a feminist philosophy of life. The relation between matter and life is the litmus test I use for what kinds of contemporary scientific research—while not explicitly feminist themselves—have potential implications for a feminist philosophy of life. I read contemporary origins research through the writings of a number of theorists or philosophers, such as Henri Bergson, Ilya Prigogine, Gilbert Simondon, Raymond Ruyer, Luce Irigaray, and Elizabeth Grosz. Across four chapters, I engulf key debates in origins of life studies—the evolution of metabolism, the invention of the first cellular membranes, and the birth of genetics, and the beginning of heredity—in a far-from-equilibrium fluid milieu that creates the possibility for their emergence.

Today, humans must rely on technical operations that exceed their perceptual threshold and control. The increasingly complex and abstract, algorithmically mediated operations of global capital have only deepened the gap between the social order as a whole and its lived experience. Yet, Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping acts as a model for how we might begin to articulate the relationship between the psychic and social realms, as well as the local and global scales. Jameson’s attentiveness to the conflicting tendencies of capitalist operations is still helpful for us to map the local instantiations of capital’s expanding frontiers – where its differential impacts are felt and negotiated strongly.

This dialectical move, unifying and differentiating at once, is crucial for my project of situating the Middle East within the imperial operations of global capital, thereby overcoming its peripherical reading. In contrast to the post-oil spectacles of the Arabian Gulf, such as Dubai, I look at the war-torn and toxic cities that are spreading in the rest of the region, such as Beirut, due to the violent operations of militarized states as well as the ever-growing economic and ecological deterioration. Hence, these cities constitute two sides of the same coin, bounded by more extensive structures of wealth accumulation and class formation in the region underlying the dominance of the Gulf and US imperialism. Consequently, we can unpack the spatial-temporal reconfigurations of global capital from the vantage point of the Middle East, especially along with the entangled trajectories of oil, finance, militarism, logistics, and computation.

Expanding on Jonathan Beller’s idea of computational capital, I argue that computational media are instrumentalized as an imperial apparatus within the matrix of racial capitalism. In other words, computational media are operationalized within a capitalist society that preys on the continuous reproduction of imperial divisions, techniques, institutions, and rights while obscuring their historicity. Thus, we need to bring back the historicity of those forms as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present, including from material conditions (labor) to ethico-legal systems (law). Consequently, Jameson’s cognitive mapping needs to be reconfigured not only due to the shifts in the granularity and scale of capitalist extraction but also due its embeddedness within the histories of modern thought and colonialism.

My aim is to revive the utopian project of envisioning alternatives to capitalism while reformulating the image of historicity and globality today. To this end, I examine countervisual practices in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terms, intervening in the economic, legal, and symbolic systems that animate computational media in the Middle Eastern context, ranging from smart weapons to smart cities. My analyses show that artistic practice could allow us some insights about the economic and social structures that govern our immediate and situated experience, whereas media studies could help us to navigate through the convoluted cartographies of computational capital today.

As my project demonstrates, there is no privileged position or method of cognitive mapping, which ultimately corresponds to an active negotiation of urban space. Those urban struggles will persist, always exceeding the bounds of our theories. My project affirms an aesthetic that does not exist yet, not because it is impossible but, rather, it cannot be encapsulated in a formula since it is always already in the process of making on the streets.

Dwelling with the alterity of the deep sea, my dissertation, "Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater," considers how the ocean environment produces cognitively estranging conditions for conceptualizing media and media theory. Concepts in media theory have thus far exhibited what I call a "terrestrial bias," theorizing primarily dry technologies through a language whose metaphorics have developed through human lives lived on land, rather than in the volume of the sea. In order to better understand the "terrestrial bias" in media theory, I develop a critical method of "conceptual displacement" that involves submerging key concepts in media theory underwater, engaging both literary texts and digital media. Specifically, I turn to Vilém Flusser's speculative fiction text "Vampyroteuthis Infernalis" to rethink "inscription"; ocean data visualizations to rethink "database"; and Jacques Cousteau's diving narratives to rethink "interface." Focusing on the ocean expands the critical discussion of the relation between embodiment and knowledge taken up by feminist science studies, and necessitates the inclusion of the environmental conditions for knowing; our milieu determines the possibilities of our media, and the way that we theorize our media in language. The ocean thus serves as an epistemic environment for thought that estranges us from our terrestrial habits of perception and ways of speaking about media, providing an important check on the limits of theory and terrestrial knowledge production, compelling us to have the humility to continually try to see--and describe--differently.

Turning to the ocean to rethink concepts in media theory makes apparent the interrelation between technology, desire, ecology, and the survival of human communities. While media theory has long been oriented toward preservation and culture contexts of recording, studying media in ocean contexts requires that we consider conditions that are necessarily but contingently ephemeral. Yet to engage with the ephemeral is also to engage with issues of mortality and the desire towards preservation--of what we want to remain--a question that especially haunts coastal communities vulnerable to sea-level rise. What the ocean teaches us, then, is to reflect on what we want our media technologies to do, as well as the epistemological question of how we are habituated to see and perceive. By considering the ocean as a medium and as an estranging milieu for reconsidering media concepts, I argue for an expanded definition of "media" that accounts for the technicity of natural elements, considering how media futures are not only a matter of new digital innovations, but fundamentally imbricated with the archaic materiality of the analog.