Browsing by Subject "Critical theory"

I argue in this dissertation that “climate impasse” — knowing much and doing little about climate change — has become a defining political, social, and cultural problem of the contemporary period (1980s to the present). Supposing that representations of impasse reveal something about the origins, features, and trajectories of U.S. climate politics, I perform close readings and historical analyses of exemplary texts across a range of media (novels, feature films, eco-political manifestos) to consider how the gap between knowing about climate change and doing something about it has been narrated in four U.S. environmental discourses: an “ecocritical” discourse that narrates impasse in terms of representational failure; an “ecofascist” discourse that closes the gap between knowing and doing by vowing to defend Northern borders against rising seas and migrant tides; an “ecofugitive” discourse that holds out the possibility of escape from the dangers of the present; and an “ecosocialist” discourse that resolves impasse by imagining decommodified forms of “social reproduction” that decouple life from fossil fuels. I find, first, that the material and epistemological dimensions of impasse arise from the ownership structure of “fossil capitalism” in the neoliberal period, which not only yokes the reproduction of waged/salaried life to the combustion of fossil fuels, but also profoundly shapes how climate change passes into the cultural imagination. I observe, second, that climate impasse calls into question the political imaginary of U.S. liberalism, which understands social progress to be driven by cycles of revelation and reform. Finally, I conclude that the imagination has a crucial role to play in moving beyond impasse — not by making the effects of climate change more visible, immediate, or dramatic, but by illuminating concrete strategies for abolishing the political economic structures that give rise to impasse in the first place.

Dreaming Woman decenters Europeanist histories of psychoanalysis by examining the ways in which forced migration has shaped psychoanalytic theories of sexual difference and evolving modes of feminist practice in Latin America. Home to more psychoanalysts per capita than any other country, Argentina emerged as a site of political asylum during WWII and of exilic dissemination during periods of military dictatorship. Taking Argentina as an exemplary case of psychoanalytic entrenchment that disrupts neat oppositions between Europe and its others, Dreaming Woman reframes the psychoanalytic archive on sexual difference as a discourse on migration. Tracing the coincident rise of psychoanalysis and authoritarianism in Argentina, I examine the role of migrant women, and of discourses on Woman, in establishing new relationships between psychoanalysis and politics.

Through a multimedia archive that includes literature, autobiography, pop culture artifacts, transnational correspondences, clinical case studies, theoretical essays, and artwork, Dreaming Woman approaches psychoanalysis as a heterogeneous set of clinical and cultural practices through which Argentines have articulated distinctive feminist and anti-imperialist projects throughout the twentieth century. These archival materials share a concern for female sexuality as a national problem—that is, a problem tied to national identity and a problem for the nation-state to solve. They also show the transformative impact of clinical encounters with female sexuality, maternal grief, and torture on modern theories of the subject. In view of contemporary anxieties surrounding global migration, the case of Argentina shows that psychoanalysis has always been a political practice forged through exile, one that offers an indispensable conceptual framework for addressing the persistent psychic traces of displacement.

This dissertation investigates how non-academic agents (i.e. artists, curators, and institutions) helped construct the current canon of Latin American art. It takes as case studies key exhibitions held in Brazil in order to examine how the central concepts of anthropophagy, geometric abstraction, and the political came to characterize the art of the region. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, this work traces a local genealogy, thus offering a different starting point for understanding the Latin American art canon that has been recently institutionalized in such places as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York as part of the global turn in art history.

Citing their different language and colonial history, Brazilian artists and critics have tended to view their art production as distinct from that of the rest of the continent. This dissertation, by contrast, recognizes Brazil as a fundamental player in the shaping of both a Latin American cultural identity and an expanded notion of the Americas. This expansion of Latin American art influences how artists represent themselves and how such production is actively being inserted into collections around the world.

There is a scene in Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale in which Offred, eponymous handmaid to the totalitarian theocracy that now governs America, is overwhelmed by the sudden need to laugh. Spasms wrack her body. She crams her hands into her mouth, she fears she will vomit, she imagines she is giving birth. Finally, well aware that her convulsions would register as subversion to a regime that polices bodies and supervises affects, Offred crawls into a cupboard in an effort to "compose herself." Laughter without Humor arose from this passage, from the inexplicable laughter that overwhelms Offred's disciplined body and demolishes her carefully composed self. The suspicion that laughter challenges the self-contained "I" has always been buried in our idioms: the subject "dissolves" in laughter, the individual proliferates suddenly into a "barrel" or "bundle" of laughs, ontological boundaries are breached as we "roar" or "bark" with laughter. In the twentieth-century, laughter appears across a wide variety of artistic forms as a vigorous affective force capable of convulsing being and exploding calcified structures of thought. This project examines the interrelationship between fictional depictions of humorless laughter and the dissolution and reconfiguration of the subject in poststructuralist theory.

The field of humor studies, which counts Aristotle, Kant, and Freud among its contributors, avoids laughter's irrational properties and instead offers scientific reasons--physiological, evolutionary, and psychological--as to why we laugh. In contrast, Laughter without Humor seeks to understand laughter on its own terms by posing an alternate question: what does laughter do? In four chapters, I consider four discrete strains of humorless laughter: the dankly corporeal flow of a specifically female "dangerous laughter" (Chapter 1), the blustering wave of "ecstatic laughter" associated with mystic experience (Chapter 2), an infectious "grotesque laughter" that tosses the individual back and forth between ontological categories with uncanny fervor (Chapter 3), and the shattering shriek of "atomic laughter" that indexes the experience of total nuclear annihilation (Chapter 4). In particular I focus on literary work from William James, André Breton, T.S. Eliot, Nathanael West, Henri Michaux, Kurt Vonnegut, Stanley Kubrick, Margaret Atwood, and Steven Millhauser; and on philosophical texts by Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément, Julia Kristeva, Édouard Glissant, Brian Massumi, and Eugenie Brinkema. I ultimately argue that the messy burst of laughter disturbs the intelligibility of both self and text. In so doing, it clears a space to imagine new, provisional models of personhood that are based on affective entanglement rather than rational self-containment.

What ideological dreams does music express? And how does it do so? In listening to three paradigmatic moments in American Jazz, this dissertation attempts to answer these two problems by illustrating how the modes of our production structure the range of our interpretive possibilities, and how music responds to and overcomes these dilemmas aesthetically.

"Postmarked Constellations" examines how three late-twentieth century American writers bring long historical processes into view through their use of paraliterary forms. The term paraliterary is used in this study to refer to a set of popular cultural forms that overlap the field of the "literary," thereby complicating the latter's assumed autonomy from the impurities of everyday life. Focusing upon the historical fictions of Gayl Jones's blues novel Corregidora (1975), Samuel R. Delany's sword and sorcery series Return to Nevèrÿon (1979-1987), Cormac McCarthy's Western novel Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985), this dissertation argues that these writers strategically turn to the paraliterary in order to engage their own moment's historical crisis within a larger trajectory of Anglo-European Western expansionism within the Americas. In adopting the blues (Gayl Jones), sword and sorcery (Delany), and the Western (McCarthy), these writers do not merely incorporate elements of these cultural forms, but rather transform their codes and conventions in order to bring past historical experiences into contact with the present. In so doing these writers draw out the historical dimensions internal to each of these generic forms. They show the degree to which genres are embedded within a larger world system, one that cannot be reduced to a national cultural imaginary, but must be placed within a longer-unfolding geopolitical context of colonial modernity, the Atlantic slave trade, the dispossession of indigenous peoples, and the emergence of a world market.

While written between the years 1975-1987, the texts of this study explore the deeper historical traumas specific to nineteenth-century U.S. expansionism. In turning to these specific histories--either in directly formal ways, as in McCarthy's Western or in the much broader terms of their legacies, as in Jones's blues novel or Delany's sword and sorcery series--these texts reveal the often obscured continuities between nineteenth-century and late-twentieth century forms of American empire. The chapters of this dissertation underscore how the blues, sword and sorcery, and the Western are tied to popular cultural forms that emerge, if not directly out of a nineteenth-century U.S. imperial literary and mass entertainment culture, then out of the historical experiences upon which such mass cultural phenomena was based. But these texts also complicate such ties to an imperial cultural imaginary by actively transforming the narrative logic of their generic forms. Tracing out the paraliterary dimensions of these texts thus allows us to constellate the historical past that their narratives examine with the late-twentieth century historical present in which they appear. In a period characterized by liberation movements and large-scale revolts both at home and abroad, these texts respond both to specifically national situations as well as to unfinished world historical processes. In this respect, these are American fictions concerned less with their quintessential Americanness--a preoccupation of both nineteenth- and early-twentieth century writers and critics--than with their peculiar relation to the world as Americans. "Postmarked Constellations" therefore proposes a method for tracking, not just a new engagement with the historicity of cultural forms within late-American fictions, but also for understanding the response of American writers to a radically new experience of globalization.

This dissertation takes as its starting point what contemporary cultural, literary, and science fiction scholarship have described as the “end of the future,” or the post-1970s rise in stagnant, bleak, and apocalyptic images of what is to come. Using science fiction films and novels as its primary objects of inquiry, it argues that such a dystopian (or false utopian) imaginary should not be normatively chastised or embraced, but rather analyzed as part of a set of post-productive capitalist conditions. Doing so makes visible both the material constraints upon the contemporary imagination—the way that images of decline, particularly in SF, are cognitively imbricated in their larger socio-economic moment—and what is termed the “postfuturist problem,” or the question of science fiction without a future. With both ideas in mind, the ultimate claim is that in order to think science fiction (and cultural production more broadly) in a moment of imaginative foreclosure, one must look deeper into these no-futurist works themselves. Rather than nostalgically lingering upon the past, lamenting the loss of a dynamic and optimistic futurism, our task is to discern how renewed conditions of thought might develop out of the contradictions of the present. In an era without a future, science fiction—and culture writ large—does not gain its relevance (its ability to map and estrange us from our actually-existing reality) by offering visions of the radically new and different, but immanently, within the hyper-extended confines of the present.

Social and cultural form is being reshaped by the increasing centrality of logistical science to everyday lived experience. Formerly confined to the governance of commodity chains, logistics’ influence has grown into a pervasive social rationality that promotes endless circulation and perpetual uncertainty as inextricable realities of contemporary life. Its ubiquity, I argue, is creating an altogether new global economic system which I call the logistical mode of production. As a planetary system of governance and control, the logistical mode of production operates on many geographical and temporal registers at once. My project thus employs a multi-scalar approach to capture the diversity of spaces and speeds that simultaneously converge to form our new logistical reality. I begin with the largest scale, i.e. the planetary logistical infrastructure that has historically been defined by the global supply chain. Its most significant actor, Amazon.com, has radically restructured commodity chains to service its worldwide retail network and fulfill its promise of rapid on-demand consumption. Beneath Amazon’s reconfiguration of the global supply chain exists what I call the social supply chain. It is defined by on-demand service apps like Uber and Deliveroo, whose platforms redirect logistical media’s governance of commodity circulation to control and coordinate human movement through urban space. As significant conductors of human circulation, mobile platforms not only reshape physical geographies, but restructure individual subjectivity along logistical lines. I therefore conclude my project by analyzing how the logistical mode of production creates individual subjects that embody its ideals of ceaseless circulation, infinite flexibility, and ruthless efficiency.

This dissertation, “The Privatization of Protection: The Neoliberal Fourteenth Amendment” examines how the importation of private law and free market frameworks into public law have reshaped the Supreme Court’s understanding of equality and due process in areas as diverse as international arbitration, access to abortion, and affirmative action. My research draws on both legal and critical theory methods, reading studies of political economy alongside analysis of doctrinal and historical sources, to explore how the rhetoric of the market transforms and limits the ways we imagine our society and the role of government in it. This dissertation traces how the embrace of the models of efficiency, choice, and human capital by both liberal and conservative justices alike has eroded the law’s protective role. Equal protection and due process have been redefined according to the needs, logics, and limits of the market with consequences disproportionately borne by the poor and working class.

From North Africa and the Middle East to Europe, the Americas, and East Asia, the social movements of the past decade have, without being in explicit dialogue with one another, resembled the same march into the public street. Despite the breadth of the cultural, political, and topographical variations in the spaces and places that these movements cover, even in a city like Hong Kong, where the development of urban space has taken a trajectory and assumed a quality of unique status, protest seems to march to the beat of the same drum in Hong Kong’s tropical, urban financial center as it does in St. Louis’ suburban neighborhoods. Why, despite the obvious differences from city-to- city and street-to-street, does protest seem to look the same across societies, cultures, and regimes?

This paper explores the theoretical matrix by which discourses of the street have emerged alongside the imperialisms of the nineteenth century to take inventory of the ways in which the street speaks and is spoken about in the city, in politics, in poetry and literature. While these discourses illuminate the coordinates and mediations in the implicit conception of the street, they only complement the very real emergence and mutations of urban space in Hong Kong in the twentieth century driven by finance capital. I chart the contours of the history of the street in Hong Kong and the ways of capturing the assemblies that have always taken place on it in a step towards understanding how social movement and political assembly can be made effective in contemporary urban space.

This dissertation, "Theories of Everything: Science Fiction, Totality, and Empire in the Twentieth Century," argues that the ideology of empire shares with science fiction an essential cognitive orientation towards totality, an affinity which has made science fiction a privileged site for both the promotion and the critique of imperial ideologies in the United States and Britain in the twentieth century. The cultural anxieties that attend a particular moment of empire are especially manifest in that period's science fiction, I argue, because of the importance of science and technology: first as a tool of imperial domination and second as a future-oriented knowledge practice that itself has totalizing aspirations, grasping with one hand towards so-called "theories of everything" while with the other continually decentering and devaluing humanity's importance in larger cosmic history. As technological modernity begins to develop horizons of power and knowledge increasingly beyond the scale of the human, I argue, science fiction becomes an increasingly important cognitive resource for navigating the ideological environments of modern political subjects.

In particular I argue for a new understanding of the science fiction genre focused on an aspiration to totality: cognitive maps of the historical world-system on a immense, even hyperbolically cosmic, scale. In the twentieth century empire itself is one such totality, insofar as imperial ideology asserts the existence of a historical logic of progress that ultimately culminates in the empire itself. Such totalities necessarily provoke thoughts of their own inevitable negation, an eventuality I organize around the general category of "apocalypse." In three chapters I consider apocalyptic texts concerning entropy and evolution (chapter one), environmental collapse and ecological futurity (chapter two), and zombie catastrophe (chapter 3). In particular I focus on literary work from Isaac Asimov, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, Olaf Stapledon, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert Kirkman, Joss Whedon, Ted Chiang, and Philip K. Dick. I ultimately argue that the totalizing thought experiments of science fiction have functioned as a laboratory of the mind for empire's proponents and detractors alike, offering a "view from outside" from which the course of history might be remapped and remade. As a result--far from occupying some literary periphery--I argue science fiction in fact plays a central role in political struggles over history, empire, identity, justice, and the future itself.

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.