Browsing by Author "Hayles, Katherine"

In this dissertation I use an old and unfashionable form of literary criticism, close reading, to offer a new and unfashionable account of the literary subgenre called camp. Drawing on the work of, among many others, Susan Sontag, Rita Felski, and Peter Lamarque, I argue that P.G. Wodehouse, E.F. Benson, and Angela Thirkell wrote a type of pure comedy I call chaste camp. Chaste camp is a strange beast. On the one hand it is a sort of children’s literature written for and about adults; on the other hand it rises to a level of literary merit that children’s books, even the best of them, cannot hope to reach.

Since 1964, the year in which Sontag’s famous essay “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” was first published, literary camp has been defined as exclusively queer, and therefore unchaste and entirely grown-up, and in the process the purity of its comedy—and most of its comedy, as well—has been ignored. I trace these two unfortunate developments to the rise of critique, a method of literary criticism defined by its cynicism about literature’s relationship to the world outside of art. A novel, play, or poem that is not interrogating the status quo is, according to practitioners of critique, doomed to sustain it.

Reading Wodehouse, Benson, and Thirkell closely, rather than subjecting them to critique, shows that chaste camp offers a superior, artificial and therefore very durable alternative to the status quo—as most good literature does. To insist that literature adjust itself to the ever-changing aims of critique, and fit itself into the real world, is to demand that it be something unliterary. The wonderful paradox of pure comedy, of which chaste camp is perhaps the preeminent type, is that its artificiality makes it timeless. It is in the world, but emphatically not of the world.

These, then, are my conclusions—that Wodehouse, Benson, Thirkell, and Evelyn Waugh wrote camp; that camp is a type of comedy; that there is a kind of camp that has gone unnamed, whose name is chaste camp; that chaste camp is a kind of pure comedy; finally, that close reading in combination with the judicious use of literary scholarship reveals these and other truths that critique, in its slavish devotion to novelty and fashion, keeps hidden.

Digitization of library collections has made millions of books, newspapers, and academic journal articles accessible. These resources present an opportunity for historians interested in identifying patterns in cultural production that emerge over the space of decades or even centuries. For example, considerable interest has been expressed in studying the emergence, decline, and transmission across national and linguistic boundaries of literary form in the tens of thousands of novels published in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Navigating such a large collection of texts, however, requires the use of quantitative methods rarely used in literary studies; the single, direct reading of even a thousand texts exceeds the time and resources available to most historians.

This dissertation demonstrates the application of probabilistic model of texts in the study of literary history. The major finding of the dissertation is that regularities previously identified by literary historians can be captured by probabilistic models. Following the first chapter, "How to Read 22,198 Journal Articles: Studying the History of German Studies Using Topic Models," which introduces representations of texts used in the dissertation, chapter 3, "Inferring Novelistic Genre in the English Novel, 1800-1836," and chapter 4, "Networks of Literary Production," illustrate the contribution probabilistic models of novelistic production are positioned to make to long-standing questions in literary history. Both chapters are concerned with the detection and description of empirical regularities in surviving nineteenth-century English novels, such as the recurrence of novelistic genres--e.g., gothic, silver fork, and national tale novels. Chapter 3 makes use of a corpus that includes a random sample of novels published in the British Isles between 1800 and 1836. The use of a random sample and of probabilistic methods, both uncommon in literary studies, serves to develop new conceptual resources for future work in literary history and the sociology of literature.

By combining literary, ecocritical, and media techniques with a mindfulness of the environment, “Digital Environmental Metabolisms: An Ecocritical Project of the Digital Environmental Humanities” contributes to the urgent task of re-orienting media theory toward environmental concerns. It is informed by the premise that, in our present Anthropocenic age defined by humans acting as a geophysical force, human bodies, cultural technologies, and the earth are intersecting material practices. I argue this intersectionality is neither cyborgian nor posthuman, as some media scholars insist, but is something far more natural: it is a metabolic relationship wherein each system is inherently implicated in the perpetuation of the others. Through a series of chapters that dispense with standard maps of cyberspace and the social network replacing them with a digital geography of wires, workers, warehouses, and waste, this project shifts the media theoretical focus from one grounded in computation to one fully rooted in the earth. Unlike others, like those mentioned here within, who are contributing to what may be called an emerging environmental media studies, I offer several practical and theoretical interventions, including Permaculture and Ecocritical Digital Humanities, that are capable of moving us toward more sustainable digital practice and a more robust Anthropocene Humanities.

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.

How does gay pornography inscribe gay identity, and what might that inscription reveal? Pornographesis asks how gay pornography has come to organize the feelings, desires, pleasures, memories, attachments, and identifications of the male homosexual subject. LGBTQ scholarship tends to forego a rigorous study of gay erotic media altogether in favor of less sexualized, more recuperable objects. As a result, the representational histories and media cultures of gay pornography remain largely obscured from contemporary discourse. This dissertation examines regimes of gay pornography that make visible its shifting contours. Unlike other studies that take pornography as their subject, mine does not aim to reduce pornography’s meaning to monolithic postures of either pleasure or harm, but rather locates the possibility for vexed in-betweens, discontinuities, and ruptures. The central question of Pornographesis is not just how gay pornography inscribes gay identity, but how that inscription changes over time and according to circumstance. Across four sequential eras, I examine notable shifts in the narrative structures, cultural position, and reception practices of gay pornography. I link these shifts to changes in media, from 8 and 16mm film to video, print, telephonic, theatrical, and digital technologies.

Situated as an Americanist project, Pornographesis engages the historical materialism, media shifts, and narrative dynamisms that attend its development from the 1960s to today. Following Laura Kipnis’s notion that pornography is one of culture’s honored sites for working through social problems, I approach gay pornography as an engagement with the “problem” that homosexuality has been thought to constitute. In each era, gay pornography inscribes identity around a different set of relations to produce figures that range from necessarily clandestine, to defiantly perverse; from obsessively technophilic, to exploitatively entrepreneurial. Moreover, each era reveals the many and changing demands that the producers and viewers alike place on pornography: that it be beautiful, liberated, narrative, risky, safe, carnal, political, elegiac, honest, authentic, masculine, interactive, and so forth. As such, this dissertation argues that there is not just one uniform gay pornographic culture, but many. The mercurial quality of gay pornography delivers not just pleasure, but critical intervention in political crises, alternate imaginings of social structures, and valuable contestation of the rigid demands of heteronormative masculinity. Pornographesis makes the case that the study of gay male pornography is not merely instructive, but is in fact crucial for comprehending modern gay identity.

The dissertation brings together approaches across the fields of physics, critical theory, literary studies, philosophy of physics, sociology of science, and history of science to synthesize a hybrid approach for instigating more rigorous and intense cross-disciplinary interrogations between the sciences and the humanities. I explore the concept of speculation in particle physics and science fiction to examine emergent critical approaches for working in the two areas of literature and physics (the latter through critical science studies), but with the expectation of contributing new insights to media theory, critical code studies, and also the science studies of science fiction.

There are two levels of conversations going on in the dissertation; at the first level, the discussion is centered on a critical historiography and philosophical implications of the discovery Higgs boson in relation to its position at the intersection of old (current) and the potential for new possibilities in quantum physics; I then position my findings on the Higgs boson in connection to the double-slit experiment that represents foundational inquiries into quantum physics, to demonstrate the bridge between fundamental physics and high energy particle physics. The conceptualization of the variants of the double-slit experiment informs the aforementioned critical comparisons. At the second level of the conversation, theories are produced from a close study of the physics objects as speculative engine for new knowledge generation that are then reconceptualized and re-articulated for extrapolation into the speculative ontology of hard science fiction, particularly the hard science fiction written with the double intent of speaking to the science while producing imaginative and socially conscious science through the literary affordances of science fiction. The works of science fiction examined here demonstrate the tension between the internal values of physics in the practice of theory and experiment and questions on ethics, culture, and morality.

Nevertheless, the dissertation hopes to show the beginnings of a possibility, through the contentious but generative space provided by speculative physics, to produce more cross-collaborative thinking between physics as represented by the hard sciences, and science fiction representing the objects of literary enterprise and creative evolution.

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.

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.