Notes from the underground: a cultural, political, and aesthetic mapping of underground music

The term 'underground music‘, in my account, connects various forms of music-making that exist largely outside 'mainstream‘ cultural discourse, such as Drone Metal, Free Improvisation, Power Electronics, and DIY Noise, amongst others. Its connotations of concealment and obscurity indicate what I argue to be the music‘s central tenets of cultural reclusion, political independence, and aesthetic experiment. In response to a lack of scholarly discussion of this music, my thesis provides a cultural, political, and aesthetic mapping of the underground, whose existence as a coherent entity is being both argued for and ̳mapped‘ here. Outlining the historical context, but focusing on the underground in the digital age, I use a wide range of interdisciplinary research methodologies , including primary interviews, musical analysis, and a critical engagement with various pertinent theoretical sources. In my account, the underground emerges as a marginal, 'antermediated‘ cultural 'scene‘ based both on the web and in large urban centres, the latter of whose concentration of resources facilitates the growth of various localised underground scenes. I explore the radical anti-capitalist politics of many underground figures, whilst also examining their financial ties to big business and the state(s). This contradiction is critically explored, with three conclusions being drawn. First, the underground is shown in Part II to be so marginal as to escape, in effect, post- Fordist capitalist subsumption. Second, the practice of 'co-determination‘ is seen to allow politically engaged underground artists to channel public and private funds into various practices of contestation. Third, and finally, I argue across Part III that in its distinctive musical and iconographic forms, the underground offers a kind of profaning, deforming, sublimating aesthetic 'counter-magic‘, where radical aesthetic modes and radical practices of representation communicate a kind of 'reconfiguration of the sensible‘ to audiences. I argue that this 'reconfiguration‘ might yield emancipatory political readings, whilst also reflecting the kinds of experimental and exploratory musical practices typical in the underground

A recognitive theory of identity and the structuring of public space

This thesis presents a theory of the self as produced through processes of recognition that unfold and are conditioned by public, political spaces. My account stresses the dynamic and continuous processes of identity formation, understanding the self as continually composed through intersubjective processes of recognition that unfold within and are conditioned by the public spaces wherein subjects appear before one another. My theory of the self informs a critique of contemporary identity politics, understanding the justice sought by such politics as hampered by identity enclosure. In contrast to my understanding of the self, the self of identity enclosure is understood as a series of connecting, philosophical pathologies that replicate conditions of oppression through their ontological, epistemological, and phenomenological positions on the self and political space. The politics of enclosure hinge upon a presumptive fixity, understanding the self as abstracted from political spaces of appearance, as a factic entity that is simply given once and for all. Beginning with Hegel's account of identity as recognised, I stress the phenomenological dimensions of recognition, using these to demonstrate how recognition requires a fundamental break from the fixity and rigidity often displayed within the politics of enclosure. I further defend my account of recognition against several overarching critiques of the recognitive tradition, as postulated by Foucault, Oliver, and Markell – a defence which requires a break with these preceding traditions in exchange for a far clearer spatial and phenomenological grounding acquired through a turn towards the work of Hannah Arendt. This turn develops into an examination as to how political spaces condition processes of recognition through producing variable conditions of visibility, dynamics I explore through the works of Arendt, Ahmed, and Gramsci. Given that the politics of enclosure find striking f0rms of expression in social media fora, my final chapter provides a critique of these fora as spaces of appearance. Contra to techno-optimist accounts of social media technologies as de facto sources of popular, democratic empowerment, I contend that the pathologies of identity enclosure find a particularly intense expression within online spaces. I show that the praxeis of mainstream identity politics are severely hampered by these pathologies, and I argue that a praxis informed by a recognitive theory of the self would be better placed to achieve the transformative projects of these politics – particularly with respect to their underlying ethical motivations

Mobile bodies : train travel and practices of movement

This thesis investigates experiences of railway travel from a passenger perspective by looking at how passengers move through and dwell within spaces of the railway journey. It responds to a lack of attention to diverse processual enactments and theorisations of processes and practices that constitute these flows. Challenging both the theory that this particular 'space of flows' constitutes a non-place that is characterised by placelessness, and theories that rely on aggregate models of movement that serve to pacify the body, this thesis speaks to the neglected transient experience that acknowledges how the railway journey is continually brought into being by passengers through practice rather than given a-priori. It is based on in-depth empirical research that focuses on long-distance, intercity journeys as a particular space of flows. It develops a descriptive, multi-method approach to investigate what a travelling body is and how a body becomes a travelling body; how and to what extent travel-time is planned, organised, used and valued; and how the experience of time and space transform over the duration of a journey. For many, and contrary to economically-productivist studies, the railway journey is not a wasted time, but is valued and put to use in a variety of different ways that fold through and are integrally-linked to the commitments, motivations and obligations of other time-spaces. The resulting heterogeneity of practices within the confined space of the railway carriage also has significant implications for the sociality and forms of responsibility that develop. However, certain parts of the journey are more valuable than others and within this space of flows are many durations of immobility and passivity. Nevertheless, and contrary to other practice-based studies that privilege the body-in-action, passivity does not necessarily constitute a weak form of inhabiting the world. This research demonstrates how multiple configurations of passivity come into play at different points during the railway journey to assist in making the process of travel easier. In sum, this thesis mobilises new ways of looking at transient spaces which attempt to move beyond a sedentary metaphysics of space

Assembling the value of nature : a performative analysis of English biodiversity offsetting and the DEFRA pilot study

This thesis explores the UK Government’s Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs’ (DEFRA) 2-year pilot study into biodiversity offsetting (BDO) in England. The objective is to investigate the socio-technical assemblages of biodiversity offsetting to examine what it means to value biodiversity in practice, how the ensuing values materialise and with what effects. The thesis undertakes a multi-sited investigation of the DEFRA pilot study. Firstly I explore the origins of the BDO assemblage focussing on two of its critical elements, the policy standard of ‘no net loss’ of biodiversity and the central calculative device, the DEFRA metric. I contextualise these conceptual and calculative technologies within the wider socio-political milieus in which they were conceived, circulated and subsequently took effect. The next three chapters present case studies built through diachronic empirical engagements with three sites of the DEFRA pilot. These chapters trace the assemblages of actual BDO negotiations, efforts to value biodiversity by actors in-situ, and the tensions that threaten these processes. Lastly, I explore the value/s conflicts appearing in these case studies through an empirical investigation of the BDO dispute as it played out at the Business and Biodiversity Offsetting Programme (BBOP) conference in London in June 2014. I argue for an understanding of value making in conservation as a performative project through which the values of nature are actively constructed and assembled via social, political and technical processes that can be documented empirically. I emphasise that biodiversity value does not therefore exist waiting to be captured but is actively performed through the assemblages and practices of BDO. The thesis concludes by discussing the implications of a valuation approach in conservation noting the necessary occlusions this sustains and the important changes to biodiversity conservation policy and practice it signals. Keywords: Biodiversity offsetting, Conservation policy, English biodiversity offsetting pilot, DEFRA, Assemblage, Performativity, Valu

Design and real-time control of shipboard power system testbed

The objective of this thesis is to design and test a small scale testbed for the all-electric shipboard power distribution system. Shipboard power system is increasingly becoming more reconfigurable, and multi-agent systems are developed to automate routine operation and emergency reconfiguration. Underlying algorithms of these systems have been verified using software simulation tools. However, these simulators run in soft realtime by using simple mathematical models to represent the physical system. These models do not incorporate every aspect of the physical system. A testbed provides a cost effective physical environment to verify these algorithms and control techniques in the real world. This testbed, based on the Navy\u27s notional all electric ship, keeps characteristic features of the Office of Naval Research\u27s Integrated Power System. It provides a platform for testing local and distributed controls. Local embedded controllers on the testbed run in hard real-time, and a CAN bus builds the communication networking among them. Performance of the controllers has been verified successfully, and the platform provides an environment that allows prototyping and testing agent-based higher-level controls and decision making entities

Seepage: Developing and Conserving Global Literary Environmentalities

My dissertation identifies and compares the literary techniques that form narratives of environmentalism in Global Anglophone Literature, ecocriticism, environmental science, and environmental policy in the twentieth and the twenty-first century. I analyze the environmentalism afforded by these techniques in terms of their inclusivity and accessibility to a planetary democratic public using a method of critical analysis that is informed by postcolonial, ecocritical, queer, critical race, and democratic theorists. Due to the global, intersectional, coalitional, and democratic requirements of environmental justice, I selected literary texts to include as much of the planet as possible and to exclude texts with explicit environmentalist commitments. In order to address concern about participatory parity among diverse stakeholders, I examined the environmental conversations that emerged between works by marginalized authors and more canonical literary texts. Each chapter considers the potential formation of environmental coalitions in the absence of critical precedent or common ground by grouping texts around a shared stake in a particular narrative form of environmentalism, environmental justice, and fictional literature: development, restoration, conservation, and preservation. I connect each form to distinct literary techniques and elaborate how these techniques organize reader interactions with environmentalism relative to historical, cultural, environmental, and scientific contexts. Each chapter evaluates different scales of environmental politics in the narratives based on the extent to which the narratives support the participation of individuals, groups, ecosystems, communities, nations and the planet in imagining environmentalism. I evaluate these imaginative spaces in terms of their accessibility as a site of political deliberation, their inclusion of relevant stakeholders, their conductivity to critical engagement, and their creation of parity among participants. My readings offer insight into participation as a concern of postcolonial and political ecocriticism. This dissertation provides evidence that the shared imaginative spaces engendered in novels and public art serve an ethical role in creating cultural conditions necessary for planetary democratic practices that pursue environmental justice

PECULIAR THEORY: THE PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY IN SIEGFRIED KRACAUER’S THEORY OF FILM

ABSTRACT The republication of Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality by Siegfried Kracauer (1889 – 1966) in 1997 marked not just the highpoint of a period of renewed interest in his work, a period initiated by a series of events organized to mark the centenary of his birth, but also the limit of his scholarly influence. Though enthusiasm for his early sociological and cultural criticism written in Frankfurt and Berlin during the 1920s and 1930s continues to permeate research in numerous other disciplines within the humanities, his film theory continues to have little or no impact on the debates that currently define film studies. The reason for this, I argue, relates to the problematic role of philosophy in his film theory. Focusing primarily on Theory of Film, I examine in detail what makes Kracauer’s theory peculiar; peculiar in the sense that it belongs specifically to the film medium and peculiar in regard to the ambiguous philosophical claims that distinguish it from subsequent methods of film analysis. The contemporary image of Kracauer as a cultural philosopher, I argue, restricts how we read the relationship between film and philosophy in his work. I propose that from the perspective of the contemporary film-philosophy debate a critical notion of the cinematic can be restored to all facets of his work enabling a clearer understanding of how Kracauer comprehends the relationship between the filmmaker, spectator and film theorist. In turn, I conclude, this review of Kracauer’s cinematic approach as a democratised form of critical agency will benefit the understanding of philosophy and film theory as related forms of social practice

Autonomous Operation of a Reconfigurable Multi-Robot System for Planetary Space Missions

Reconfigurable robots can physically merge and form new types of composite systems. This ability leads to additional degrees of freedom for robot operations especially when dynamically composed robotic systems offer capabilities that none of the individual systems have. Research in the area of reconfigurable multi-robot systems has mainly been focused on swarm-based robots and thereby to systems with a high degree of modularity but a heavily restricted set of capabilities. In contrast, this thesis deals with heterogeneous robot teams comprising individually capable robots which are also modular and reconfigurable. In particular, the autonomous application of such reconfigurable multi-robot systems to enhance robotic space exploration missions is investigated. Exploiting the flexibility of a reconfigurable multi-robot system requires an appropriate system model and reasoner. Hence, this thesis introduces a special organisation model. This model accounts for the key characteristics of reconfigurable robots which are constrained by the availability and compatibility of hardware interfaces. A newly introduced mapping function between resource structures and functional properties permits to characterise dynamically created agent compositions. Since a combinatorial challenge lies in the identification of feasible and functionally suitable agents, this thesis further suggests bounding strategies to reason efficiently with composite robotic systems. This thesis proposes a mission planning algorithm which permits to exploit the flexibility of reconfigurable multi-robot systems. The implemented planner builds upon the developed organisation model so that multi-robot missions can be specified by high-level functionality constraints which are resolved to suitable combinations of robots. Furthermore, the planner synchronises robot activities over time and characterises plans according to three objectives: efficacy, efficiency and safety. The plannera s evaluation demonstrates an optimization of an exemplary space mission. This research is based on the parallel development of theoretical concepts and practical solutions while working with three reconfigurable multi-robot teams. The operation of a reconfigurable robotic team comes with practical constraints. Therefore, this thesis composes and evaluates an operational infrastructure which can serve as reference implementation. The identification and combination of applicable state-of-the-art technologies result in a distributed and dynamically extensible communication infrastructure which can maintain the properties of reconfigurable multi-robot systems. Field tests covering semi-autonomous and autonomous operation have been performed to characterise multi-robot missions and validate the autonomous control approach for reconfigurable multi-robot systems. The practical evaluation identified critical constraints and design elements for a successful application of reconfigurable multi-robot systems. Furthermore, the experiments point to improvements for the organisation model. This thesis is a wholistic approach to automate reconfigurable multi-robot systems. It identifies theoretical as well as practical challenges and it suggests effective solutions which permit an exploitation of an increased level of flexibility in future robotics missions