Beyond the Circle of Life

It seems certain to me that I will die and stay dead. By “I”, I mean me, Greg Nixon, this person, this self-identity. I am so intertwined with the chiasmus of lives, bodies, ecosystems, symbolic intersubjectivity, and life on this particular planet that I cannot imagine this identity continuing alone without them. However, one may survive one’s life by believing in universal awareness, perfection, and the peace that passes all understanding. Perhaps, we bring this back with us to the Source from which we began, changing it, enriching it. Once we have lived – if we don’t choose the eternal silence of oblivion by life denial, vanity, indifference, or simple weariness – the Source learns and we awaken within it. Awareness, consciousness, is universal – it comes with the territory – so maybe you will be one of the few prepared to become unexpectedly enlightened after the loss of body and self. You may discover your own apotheosis – something you always were, but after a lifetime of primate experience, now much more. Since you are of the Source and since you have changed from life experience and yet retained the dream of ultimate awakening, plus you have brought those chaotic emotions and memories back to the Source with you (though no longer yours), your life & memories will have mattered. Those who awaken beyond the death of self will have changed Reality

Towards a new envisioning of ubermensch: a trans-Nietzschean response to nihilism in the digital age

This thesis interrogates Nietzsche's ubermensch, a figure capable of overcoming the universal absence of value, and asks how it might logically be realised in light of postmodern developments in nihilism, capitalism and technology. We argue that in order to exist beyond the nihilistic nature of capitalism, one possible solution might be superintelligent artificial intelligence. We first explore the oft-overlooked problem of the village atheist, who rejects god whilst still clinging to theological values. We next look to nihilism in postmodemity, analysing semiotic and hermeneutic developments and highlighting the forces that dictate contemporary society. We then tum to capitalism, understood as a repetition of Christianity, redefining the village atheist as a figure trapped in the nihilism of semiocapitalism. Finally, we tum to technology and the future, where we reject transhuman narratives as farther repetitions of salvation, instead developing an understanding of superintelligent AI as ubermensch based on its potential to exist beyond the trappings of manmade value. This thesis simultaneously outlines the difficulties of overcoming nihilism through transhumanism whilst highlighting the dangers of embracing ubermensch, instead suggesting that a reclamation of the human posits greater grounds for survival, where the embrace of a hermeneutics of nihilism allows for smaller short-term truths

Gilbert Simondon: Media and Technics

Special issue of Platform: Journal of Media and Communicatio

Transgression, Disruption and Fragmentation in the Work of Chuck Palahniuk and Victor Pelevin

Marija Pavlović's dissertation, Cold War Kids in Neoliberal Dystopia: Transgression, Disruption, and Fragmentation in the Work of Chuck Palahniuk and Victor Pelevin, examines the evolution of transgression, disruption, and fragmentation in literature from postmodernism to contemporary forms. Introducing hypertrashrealism, she articulates this new literary movement as both a response to and a development beyond postmodern tendencies. The study significantly draws on Ihab Hassan's theory of postmodernism, providing a comparative framework that underscores key shifts in narrative and thematic approaches in the works of Palahniuk and Pelevin. This analysis emphasizes the critical transformation in literary styles and themes, reflecting contemporary societal and cultural dynamics, aiming to define a contemporary narrative alternative to the exhausted term "postmodernism" and the cumbersome "post-postmodernism.

Boxing Obsession and Realness in London Rap: Racism, Temporality, Narcissism

London Rap belongs to the transnational public of hip-hop. As a result of the birth of the genre of the music-video (in the 1980s) and the diffusion of music TV channels like MTV (from the 1990s), hip-hop has become a worldwide public first and foremost because of its visual power. The internet revolution has further expanded the audio-visuality of hip-hop, particularly via the current roles of YouTube and social media. The cognitive change this passage entails, for the younger generations of hip-hoppers, is that the technology of the video has become more commonly used than that of the book to captivate an audience. Yet, as suggested in this thesis, the screen brings to completion the search for visual analogues for words that alphabetic writing, since the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece, developed. If digital audio-visual capitalism declares the crisis of modern nationalism based on print, what I call here the “boxing obsession” – the obsession whereby words need to mean things – is still far from being dead. We observe through interviews, lyrics, speech and music-video analysis how London Conscious Rappers ambiguously relate to the boxing obsession with regards to what concerns the imagination of ethnicities. In viewing the “political correctness” of the dominant discourse as the hypocrisy to unmask, the rappers rebel against the effects the boxing obsession produces, such as police brutality, the crypto-racism of media talk, and everyday racist attacks; but in reifying views of “blackness”, “whiteness” and “Islam”, and in attaching them to specific bodies on the basis of their physical appearance, they struggle to identify the causes. The fieldwork methodology here presented (an “exit from the text”) offers a way for informants and anthropologists to definitively get to grips with the boxing obsession and move forward

Gilbert Simondon: Media and Technics

Special issue of Platform: Journal of Media and Communication on Gilbert Simondo

The Anxious Shadow of a Coldwar: Affect, Biopower & Resistance in Fiction & Culture in the Period of Intra-Anxiety 1989-2001

Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld stands as the framing text for this study of fiction, cultural affect, and resistance in the later part of the 1980’s – the exhausted, waning years of the Cold War – and the 1990’s, the period immediately following its collapse. DeLillo’s book is situated in the 1990’s, a period of what I term “intra-anxiety” following the Cold War and prior to the attacks of September 11th and the ensuing “War on Terror.” The Cold War had provided an organizing myth for America and American culture, absorbing and structuring anxieties and governing affect. “The Cold War, it gave you a reason to get up in the morning,” said John Updike in Rabbit at Rest. DeLillo seems to have thought so; his oeuvre is, in many ways, dedicated to its excavation, and Underworld is his final autopsy. The book casts its glance backward from the 1990’s through to the 1950’s. A specter – of a childhood in the Bronx, of an atomic bomb with apocalyptic designs, of a baseball and baseball game, and the lost world they represent – haunts from behind. A specter of waste and anxiety hangs over the present. A nebulous threat looms in the future: “an unseen something haunts the day,” (DeLillo, 1). The hazy image of the World Trade Center adorns the cover of Underworld. Part 1 focuses on the novel itself, attentive to three broad theoretical lenses. The first draws on the work of Michel Foucault. The Biopolitical/Disciplinary lens provides a vocabulary for thinking through myriad forms of discipline – on both population and individual levels – in the book. If we scratch below the sometimes fuzzy, if productive term “postmodernism that governed the theoretical discourse of the era, we find specific neoliberal policies – a fiscal crisis in the 1970’s, an evisceration of the working class and postwar American prosperity – that usher in the new realities of neoliberal consumerism, the “Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” described by Fredric Jameson. The second theoretical node draws on affect theory and Derrida’s work on the spectral. Harnessing the work of Lauren Berlant, Derrida, and others, I explore how nostalgia and affect govern the psychic lives of individual characters in Underworld and in the culture at large. The third broad theoretical lens is spatial. Postmodern Critical Geographers – such as David Harvey and Edward Soja – provide language for thinking through the text spatially. The novel starts with a ball game, an outdoor event that symbolizes the last moment of a certain notion of an American self that will haunt the rest of the book – most explicitly in the form as the baseball itself. Part 2 considers the way that fiction writers think about the role of the novel/writer in light of postmodernism during the 1980\u27s and 1990\u27s. I look at the essays of David Foster Wallace and of Jonathan Franzen and others in Harper\u27s magazine that worry over the role of fiction and fiction reading and that consider the role not only of the novelist but of the reading public. Part 2 of the project asks the question of whether the novel can play a significant role in a consumer, postmodern culture – if it can, in short, be a form of resistance. Part 3, thus, turns its glance more specifically to the question of resistance. I look at punk/DIY youth cultural movements, specifically the musical subcultures of hardcore and punk that sought to build alternative economies of circulation, separate and apart from corporate neoliberal consumer networks

Red Pilled - The Allure of Digital Hate

Hate is being reinvented. Over the last two decades, online platforms have been used to repackage racist, sexist and xenophobic ideologies into new sociotechnical forms. Digital hate is ancient but novel, deploying the Internet to boost its allure and broaden its appeal. To understand the logic of hate, the author investigates four objects: 8chan, the cesspool of the Internet, QAnon, the popular meta-conspiracy, Parler, a social media site, and Gab, the "platform for the people." Drawing together powerful human stories with insights from media studies, psychology, political science, and race and cultural studies, he portrays how digital hate infiltrates hearts and minds

The conservative embrace of progressive values:On the intellectual origins of the swing to the right in Dutch politics

De observatie dat rond de eeuwwisseling sprake is van een breekpunt in de Nederlandse politieke cultuur wordt inmiddels tot de dooddoeners van het publieke debat gerekend. De bliksemsnelle opkomst en dramatische moord van Pim Fortuyn resulteerde in een verbluffende verkiezingsoverwinning van zijn partij, de Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF), in wat algemeen bekend is komen te staan als de Fortuyn-revolte. Sindsdien zijn identiteit, immigratie en law and order de dominante thema’s van het publieke debat. Het was het begin van de Nederlandse culture wars, een strijdterrein waar conservatieve voorstanders van een strenger immigratie- en integratiebeleid de degens kruisten met prudente progressieven. Dit proefschrift is een ideologiestudie van de Fortuyn-revolte. De vraag die centraal staat is hoe deze cultuuromslag begrepen kan worden in ideologische zin. Tot dusver hebben onderzoekers bovenal het populisme gebruikt als lens om de politieke transformatie in Nederland te duiden. Het is een focus die de nadruk legt op stijl, techniek en retoriek, maar weinig oog heeft voor ideeën. Niet de bovenkamer maar de onderbuik, niet ideeën maar de empirische werkelijkheid van de ‘man op straat’ werd gezien als doorslaggevende factor, verder versterkt door de nieuwe macht van de media en het persoonlijke charisma van de populistische leider. Dit proefschrift gaat tegen de stroom in en richt zich op intellectuele bronnen van de Fortuyn-revolte. Daarbij wordt een ruimer conceptueel vangnet gehanteerd dan wat gebruikelijk is in bestaande studies. Politieke leiders zoals Frits Bolkestein, Pim Fortuyn, Ayaan Hirsi Ali en Geert Wilders, zo luidt de stelling, zijn enkel de meest zichtbare exponenten van een breder conservatieve stroming, aangeduid als Nieuw Rechts. De term ‘Nieuw Rechts’ kwam in omloop in de VS en het VK om de conservatieve bewegingen aan te duiden die tegelijkertijd opkwamen met Nieuw Links in de jaren zestig en zeventig. De politiek van Thatcher en Reagan wordt wel gezien als het hoogtepunt van Nieuw Rechts. De centrale these van deze studie is dat de draai naar rechts in de Nederlandse politiek langs soortgelijke lijnen te begrijpen is, als een verlate pendant van de conservatieve backlash die zich in de Anglo-Amerikaanse context al eerder ontspon

Common Psycholinguistic Themes in Mass Murderer Manifestos

Mass murder in the United States is increasing, yet understanding of mass murderers is still relatively limited. Many perpetrators compose manifestos, which include journals, blogs, letters, videos, and other writings. Previous research has indicated that personal messages are of great social and psychological importance; however, there remains an important gap in the current literature regarding studies specific to these manifestos. As such, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to provide greater understanding of mass murderers\u27 motives and mindsets through psycholinguistic analysis of their recorded words. The constructivist conceptual framework enabled gathering, analyzing, interpreting, and reporting thematic language from a purposeful sample of 12 American mass murderer manifestos, all of which were freely available online. The 6 research questions aligned with 6 psycholinguistic themes: ego survival and revenge; pseudocommando mindset: persecution, envy, obliteration; envy; nihilism; entitlement; and heroic revenge fantasy. Descriptive and analytical coding allowed for the identification of sentences and passages representative of each theme. Findings revealed a high degree of support for nihilism and ego survival and revenge, moderate support for heroic revenge fantasy and pseudocommando mindset, and limited support for entitlement and envy. These findings contribute to the existing literature, enhancing social change initiatives through increased understanding of mass murderers\u27 communications and prompting further needed research. With greater awareness comes the potential for early identification and intervention, which may favorably impact psychology and law enforcement professionals and at-risk individuals