Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1

The writers in the volume ask, implicitly, how the 21st century horizons that exceed any political, economic, or conceptual models alters or redefines a series of key topoi. These range through figures of sexual difference, bioethics, care, species invasion, war, post-carbon thought, ecotechnics, time, and so on. As such, the volume is also a dossier on what metamorphoses await the legacies of -humanistic- thought in adapting to, or rethinking, the other materialities that impinge of contemporary -life as we know it.- With essays by Robert Markley, J. Hillis Miller, Bernard Stiegler, Justin Read, Timothy Clark, Claire Colebrook, Jason Groves, Joanna Zylinska, Catherine Malabou, Mike Hill, Martin McQuillan, Eduardo Cadava and Tom Cohen

Telemorphosis: theory in the era of climate change, vol. 1

The writers in the volume ask, implicitly, how the 21st century horizons that exceed any political, economic, or conceptual models alters or redefines a series of key topoi. These range through figures of sexual difference, bioethics, care, species invasion, war, post-carbon thought, ecotechnics, time, and so on. As such, the volume is also a dossier on what metamorphoses await the legacies of -humanistic- thought in adapting to, or rethinking, the other materialities that impinge of contemporary -life as we know it.- With essays by Robert Markley, J. Hillis Miller, Bernard Stiegler, Justin Read, Timothy Clark, Claire Colebrook, Jason Groves, Joanna Zylinska, Catherine Malabou, Mike Hill, Martin McQuillan, Eduardo Cadava and Tom Cohe

Reading poetry and dreams in the wake of Freud

Adapting the question at the end of Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale', this thesis argues that reading poetic texts involves a form of suspension between waking and sleeping. Poems are not the product of an empirical dreamer, but psychoanalytic understandings of dream-work help to provide an account of certain poetic effects. Poetic texts resemble dreams in that both induce identificatory desires within, while simultaneously estranging, the reading process. In establishing a theoretical connection between poetic texts and drearit-work, the discussion raises issues concerning death, memory and the body. The introduction relates Freudian and post-Freudian articulations of dream-work to the language of poetry, and addresses the problem of attributing desire "in" a literary text. Interweaving the work of Borch-Jacobsen, Derrida and Blanchot, the discussion proposes a different space of poetry. By reconfiguring the subject-of-desire and the structure of poetic address, the thesis argues that poetic "dreams" characterize points in texts which radically question the identity and position of the reader. Several main chapters focus on texts - poems by Frost and Keats, and Freud's reading of literary dreams - in which distinctions between waking and sleeping, familiarity and strangeness, order and confusion are profoundly disturbed. The latter part of the thesis concentrates on a textual "unconscious" that insists undecidably between the cultural and the individual. Poems by Eliot, Tennyson, Arnold and Walcott are shown to figure strange dreams and enact displacements that blur the categories of public and private. Throughout, the study confronts the recurrent interpretive problem of reading "inside" and "outside" textual dreams. This thesis offers an original perspective on reading poetry in conjunction with psychoanalysis, in that it challenges traditional assumptions about phantasy and poetry dependent upon a subject constituted in advance of a poetic event or scene of phantasy. It brings poetry into systematic relation with Freud's work on dreams and consistently identifies conceptual and performative links between psychoanalysis and literature in later modernity

Becoming-child as imagistic process

Essa tese, ao procurar definir a noção operativa que anima o conceito de DevirCriança como processo imagético, apresenta um duplo propósito: postular a infância como devir e não como ser individualizado; e, subsequentemente, elaborar a predicação processual da infância como Devir-Criança e, em seu sentido mais amplo, como emergência processual. Desse modo, deseja-se deslocar a compreensão da infância e seu desdobramento conceitual para uma formulação heterogênea, aberta e indeterminada, que se expressa ao longo de linhas processuais e imagéticas, a fim de indicar o seu movimento. Colocamos o processo como imagético, baseando-o no pensamento cinematográfico de Henri Bergson e Gilles Deleuze, que identifica a imagem como um conjunto dinâmico de ações e reações, em que o cinematógrafo intervém como produtor da diferença, tanto como diferenciação quanto diferençação. O processo imanente que emerge da interação imagética é, simultaneamente, encarnado e perceptivo, sendo denominado devir. Quando dissocia-se os dois termos de Devir-Criança, produz-se dois problemas: primeiro, o de explicar o devir; e, segundo, o de associar a criança, como um agente epistêmico, ao devir. Como uma solução especulativa para a primeira aporia, com fundamentação em Gilbert Simondon, criamos uma ontogênese transindividual heterogênea e concreta, que vai além do indivíduo e produz um devir processual associado incorporado. O segundo problema consiste em desdobrar o aspecto processual da infância, identificando o movimento epistêmico que ele oferece e que designamos como noção comum em termos espinosistas. O aspecto final do trabalho trata das implicações imagéticas de uma dinâmica materialista do processo como expressão pragmática.We look to define the operative notion that animates the concept of BecomingChild as imagistic process. Our purpose is twofold: to posit childhood as a becoming rather than an individualised being and subsequently to elaborate the processual predication of childhood as becoming-child in its most general sense as processual emergence. As such, we wish to displace the understanding of childhood and its conceptual unfolding to a less stable, open-ended and indefinite heterogeneous formulation which is expressed along processual, imagistic lines in order to be able to indicate the movement. We posit process as imagistic by basing it on the cinematic thought of Bergson and Deleuze which ideates the image as a dynamic assemblage of action and reaction where the cinematograph intervenes as the producer of difference, both as differentiation and differenciation. The immanent process which emerges from imagistic interaction is simultaneously embodying and perceptual and is termed becoming. When dissociating the two terms in conceptualizing becoming-child, we perceive that we produce two problems: first, that of explicating becoming; and second, what the child represents as an epistemic agent when applied to becoming. As a speculative solution to the first aporia, we create a transindividual ontogenesis that is heterogeneous and concrete and bypasses the individual to produce an embodied associated processual becoming. The second problem consists in coming to terms with the processual aspect of childhood by identifying the epistemic movement that it affords and which we label the Common Notion. The final aspect of the work deals with the imagistic implications of a materialist dynamics of process as pragmatic expression

Library buildings around the world

"Library Buildings around the World" is a survey based on researches of several years. The objective was to gather library buildings on an international level starting with 1990

-becoming-#langscape-[fold here] intra-rupting landscape, language, and the creative act

This fine art practice-led research sets out amongst the terrain of upland Britain. Impelled by the spirit of British Romanticism, Ancient Cynicism and the art of tactics in a contemporary context, the research interrogates language and employs writing to offer a new approach to landscape. Coleridge, Constable, Graham, Lanyon and Turner provide an art historical context to the idea of ‘landscape’. From an initial methodological focus on Baradian diffraction, attention is shifted to the employment of her concepts of ‘cutting together-apart’ and intra-action. These latter are re-purposed as the more muscular intraruption in which an exertive tearing is both uncomfortable and beneficial. Further concepts are mobilised to explore the terrains of landscape and writing: Deleuzian becoming and Foucauldian parrhēsia are utilised to reanimate human relationships to and with landscape. As a result, this thesis disjunctively combines language and landscape to propose the new term and concept of langscape. A term that recognises the impossibility of a (human) union with nature through words and writing whilst simultaneously revelling in the possibilities that recognition of the difference provides in a form of becoming-landscape. This research further proposes exertion as a logic for the creative act by recognising and embracing the performative potential of long-distance walking and running, and their disruptive relationship to writing and thinking. The potential of writing (as both a verb and a noun) is explored in a fine art doctoral research context with specific attention paid to the strategy of ‘art writing’. Resulting from this exploration, the binaric structuring of practice/theory is short-circuited by an exertive poiēsis that emerges from the performative activities of the research. The terrain and form of this writing enacts (and reconceives) the relationship of art and writing in and as the thesis. The thesis is written by the langscape

Archaeology of the Voice: Exploring Oral History, Locative Media, Audio Walks, and Sound Art as Sitespecific Displacement Activities

This thesis develops a notion of an archaeology of the voice that is situated between three principal areas of research and practice: oral history, locative media, and sound art. The research takes place in the context of contested urban space in Holbeck, Leeds one of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the U.K. Through a reiterative and reflexive process of extensive interviewing, soundwalking and field recording the area is deep mapped and material gathered in order to produce a percipient led sitespecific presentation of oral history I term 'phonoscape'. Although the technology exists to connect oral history to place via locative media within a database aesthetic, a practical and conceptual gap is identified between these technologies for those working with audio interview material. In this context a purpose-built app is developed to enable oral history audio archives to be distributed geospatially, becoming navigable aurally on foot. In order to distribute a polyvocal sampling of an archive in time-space, techniques and principles from contemporary sound art are introduced, in particular a form of field composition involving an understanding of constitutive silence, soundscape, and voice editing techniques. Research into contemporary audio walk and memoryscape practice confirms that non-linear, fragmented narrative forms are used the construction of polyvocal understandings of place, and this is taken forward within a conception of the embodied hypertextual affordance of locative technology. The findings are then brought together in a transdisciplinary manoeuvre that introduces Displacement Activities, a translocational form of site-specific participatory performance art, providing a public vehicle that draws attention to phonoscape, its oral history content, and the archive itself. As an open work that is generative and reflexive, Displacement Activities extend the notion of site-specificity, finding global analogues before returning to the original site to begin the work again