KEYNOTE ADDRESS: On the Binding Biases of Time

Lance Strate is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, and Executive Director of the Institute of General Semantics. He is a Past President of the New York State Communication Association, and a recipient of NYSCA\u27s John F. Wilson Award. He is a founder and Past President of the Media Ecology Association, and author of Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a Field of Study. This is the text of his Keynote Address presented at the 67th Annual Conference of the New York State Communication Association, Ellenville, NY, October 23-25, 2009

Vernacular Posthumanism: Visual Culture and Material Imagination

Vernacular Posthumanism: Visual Culture and Material Imagination uses a theory of image vernaculars in order to explore the ways in which contemporary visual culture both reflects on and constructs 21st century cultural attitudes toward the human and the nonhuman. This project argues that visual culture manifests a vernacular posthumanism that expresses a fundamental contradiction: the desire to transcend the human while at the same time reasserting the importance of the flesh and the materiality of lived experience. This contradiction is based in a biodeterminist desire, one that fantasizes about reducing all actants, both human and nonhuman, to functions of code. Within this framework, actants become fundamentally exchangeable, able to be combined, manipulated, and understood as variations of digital code. Visual culture – and its expression of vernacular posthumanism – thus functions as a reflection on contemporary conceptualizations of the human, a rehearsal of the posthuman, and a staging ground for encounters between the human and the nonhuman. Each chapter of this project begins in the field of film studies and then moves out toward a broader analysis of visual culture and nonhumanist theory. This project relies on the theories and methodologies of phenomenology, materialism, posthumanism, object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, film and media studies, and visual culture studies. Visual objects analyzed include: the films of Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, and Krzysztof Kieślowski; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997); the film 300 (2006); the TV series Planet Earth (2006); DNA portraits, the art of Damien Hirst; Body Worlds; human migration maps; and remote surgical machinery

Cybernetic melancholia: Chris Ware’s Building Stories and cultural informatics

Chris Ware’s formal and stylistic inventiveness in his 2012 graphic narrative, Building Stories, presents a challenge to traditional theories of the form. This essay argues, however, that Ware’s experimentation can be understood through the descriptive language of cybernetic thought. Whilst the use of informatics may suggest a neutral or affectless register, Building Stories in fact presents a convergence between cybernetics and the affect of melancholia. Indeed, this is a convergence already suggested by Freud’s model of the melancholic, which functions analogously to a reflexive feedback system. Having located Ware’s graphic narrative within a longer trajectory of the exchanges between informatics and post-war literature, this essay identifies three concepts from that tradition – homeostasis, autopoiesis, and digitality – to understand Building Stories’ formal properties. The term, ‘cybernetic melancholia’, is proposed to describe the convergence between such properties and the register of melancholic affect; a convergence which, it is argued, represents a significant means of expressing the experience of a contemporary moment in which information systems are an epistemic ubiquity and melancholia is a prevalent affective register

Teleterrestrial: The Universe of Technological and Natural Scenes

In the Universe of Technical and Natural scenes, is Telerrarin. Telerrain is composed from my point of view as an artist. This terrain of combined forms is seen in three scenes that assemble technology, humanity, and the natural world. Each scene is set in different landscapes: the desert, the countryside, and the ocean. As an artist, I see these settings with the vision of a director that drives the atmosphere, life forms, and cyclical verves that make these landscapes real. As a writer, my voice describes how technology, humanity, and the natural world fit together, and then asserts the kinds of adaptations this composite needs to survive. In these scenes, the combined forms of technology, humanity, and the natural world dissipate, evaporate, condense, and emerge to form the most extraordinary strategies to survive

The Time Is Now: Embodiments of the Hyper-Present in Contemporary American Literature

For many years, writers have argued the predominant temporality of contemporary experience is an intensified present. David Harvey and Fredric Jameson argued that such an intense emphasis on the present was one of postmodernism’s principle features. Harvey argued that new communication technologies resulted in a time-space compression” that created the sense that “the present is all there is.” Similarly, Jameson argued that postmodernism reflected the logic of late capitalism, resulting in a society that “has begun to live in a perpetual present” that obliterates one’s awareness of the past or future. Although many consider we have moved beyond postmodernism, our experience of the present has only become more intensified. The omnipresence of online connectivity today through communications technologies, such as smart phones and social media, means almost everything can be addressed in the present moment. In order to better understand this phenomenon, this dissertation examines this intensified experience of the present, what I call the hyper-present, as it is embodied in four different literary texts. Chapters are devoted to The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski, Save the Date by Chris Cornell, and Queers in Love at the End of the World by Anna Anthropy. Although the form of each of these texts is significantly different, they each thrust the reader into a hyper-present reading experience. I argue that these texts challenge the pessimistic attitude that most theorists have towards the hyper-present. Although the hyper-present can present a number of important hurdles for contemporary life, it can also help us better recognize the significance of material objects, ecological threats, the limits of narrative tropes, and affectivity. Additionally, this study highlights the value of synthesizing literary and digital studies. This dissertation examines two print-based novels and two digital games. In the process it highlights both how digitality has profoundly shaped contemporary print media and how traditional literary studies has shaped digital media. Rather than being at odds, it shows how the perspectives and methodologies of literary and digital studies prove valuable regardless of media and how each approach highlights the need for and value of the other

Apperceptive patterning: Artefaction, extensional beliefs and cognitive scaffolding

In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog)

Soft computing: forms and limits in computational aesthetics

This paper contends that soft computing can help us investigate the aesthetics of digital computation. Employing broader conceptions of aesthetics and perception, and whilst drawing upon the ontology of Alfred N. Whitehead, it uses soft computing to address the 'prehensive' dimension of the quantitative procedures of computation, and explores the interrelationship between the factuality and formality of computational structures

Laruelle Qua Stiegler: On Non-Marxism and the Transindividual

Alexander R. Galloway and Jason R. LaRiviére’s article “Compression in Philosophy” seeks to pose François Laruelle’s engagement with metaphysics against Bernard Stiegler’s epistemological rendering of idealism. Identifying Laruelle as the theorist of genericity, through which mankind and the world are identified through an index of “opacity,” the authors argue that Laruelle does away with all deleterious philosophical “data.” Laruelle’s generic immanence is posed against Stiegler’s process of retention and discretization, as Galloway and LaRiviére argue that Stiegler’s philosophy seeks to reveal an enchanted natural world through the development of noesis. By further developing Laruelle and Stiegler’s Marxian projects, I seek to demonstrate the relation between Stiegler's artefaction and “compression” while, simultaneously, I also seek to create further bricolage between Laruelle and Stiegler. I also further elaborate on their distinct engagement(s) with Marx, offering the mold of synthesis as an alternative to compression when considering Stiegler’s work on transindividuation. In turn, this paper seeks to survey some of the contemporary theorists drawing from Stiegler (Yuk Hui, Al-exander Wilson and Daniel Ross) and Laruelle (Anne-Françoise Schmidt, Gilles Grelet, Ray Brassier, Katerina Kolozova, John Ó Maoilearca and Jonathan Fardy) to examine political discourse regarding the posthuman and non-human, with a particular interest in Kolozova’s unified theory of standard philosophy and Capital