Epistemologies of the Unknown: Cybernetic Cultures after the Cold War

The term “unknown” no longer merely refers to a subjective judgment indicating a stable and conceivable fact or object “in the world.” Nor does it only describe a mathematical or scientific variable that can be calculated and predicted in relation to the consistent properties or timeless truths about reality. This dissertation investigates the multiple and contested meanings of the term in ecology, security, and computational design which taken together, are suggestive of an ontological and epistemological transformation in conceiving of the relation between the environment and technology already initiated with mid-20th century cybernetic and information theories. At the heart of this reconfiguration: “life itself” is mobilized as a post-human form of computational knowledge that can be stretched to embrace indeterminacy and the unknown, fueled by a planetary nomos. As with 21st century media like accelerated computing and artificial intelligence, the environment is no longer merely modified with technologies, but is increasingly constituted by future-oriented forms of algorithmic mediation that are explored here in the larger scope of the material and environmental impacts of technology.

Instead of following the work of a specific thinker, the project undertakes an interdisciplinary reevaluation of Cold War cybernetic ontologies in the literary post-humanities, new media art and design, affect theory, and media ecology, tracing how the passage of cybernetic metaphors into the global cultural imaginary is symptomatic of an ecological reconfiguration in the way technology is accumulated as power, knowledge, and capital. Specifically, it describes how the becoming environmental of computation also entails the remediation of a history of colonial extraction and subjugation in more reticular and algorithmic forms like neural networks and intelligent design, proffering mutations as technics that redeploy the Enlightenment political and metaphysical project of the Anthropos as relational ontologies and vitalist ecological politics. The project reevaluates the rejection of the anthropos in totalizing theoretical ecologism, given the resonances of the discourse with both neoliberal political ecology and the American and European far Right where the production of life is used legitimate techno-cybernetic extraction and violence.

Against the dominant themes of new materialist media theory and affect theory, the project develops a critique of media ecology. It draws on feminist materialist and postcolonial understandings of subjectivity and sovereignty to argue that the “unknown” is no longer a technological problem to be overcome, but rather, is primarily an aesthetic phenomenon that operates at the level of material affect and environmental sense-making. Using both theoretical inquiry and case studies drawn from new media art practices and digital culture, I draw two implications of this shift for political thought: first, it is necessary to address how changes in sociality and politics in the era of accelerated and planetary computing technologies relate to transformations to the subjective characteristics of race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity beyond the individual body, population, or nation-state; second, such reconsiderations of subjectivity may help to politicize the role of contingency and unknowability in digital environments and in the speculation of technological futures.