Browsing by Subject "critical theory"
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Item Beyond the Public Sphere; The Secret Agency of the Many(2019-05) Olson, KarstenThis project seeks to reimagine human agency at scale. It does so first by destabilizing ideas of collectivity such as the “crowd,” “multitude”, and “proletariat,” and second, through exploring a new understanding of collective agency, one which is diffuse and pervasive. The first chapter charts the emergence of a vast, empirical non-identical Many within the last three decades of 18th-century Germany. During this time, the social structures of estate society were almost entirely eroded, but, critically, they were not immediately replaced by the new economic order of capitalist class society. Collectively the non-identical Many had no shared identity, or even a way in which to imagine a shared commonality. Chapter Two examines the influence exerted by the present-absence of this non-identical Many on the works of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. Lenz famously rejected the unities of time, action and place, and his plays were known for their disorienting formal structure. I argue that with the creation of his so-called “Komödie,” Lenz organizes his plays around a new sense of the interrelatedness of all individuals, an emergent sense of the totality of society, and that the seemingly fractured and chaotic form of Lenz’s plays must therefore be read as a co-authorship of the non-identical Many, a writing of a heterogeneous influence into the structure of the play itself. In the third chapter, I examine the inaugural 1788 edition of the Braunschweigisches Journal as a case study of a particular form of fragmentary, experiential writing which once again is the result of perceived pressure from a non-identical Many. The editors of this journal and others like it positioned their writing as a response to a new audience, one which they are unable to describe, except in the negative, as a “nicht Gelehrten Publicum,” bending their writing to match its imagined demands. I conclude by looking forward, suggesting that the figure of the non-identical Many could be a useful lens for understanding the rapid media changes which occurred in the early 20th century, as well as the relationship which exists between social media and the Many in our own time.Item The Human Against Itself: Posthumanism in Contemporary Novels(2015-08) Ahn, SunyoungEven as Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno were appalled by the acts of human atrocities at the height of World War II, they maintained that the human is the means to emancipation and enlightenment. The subsequent reaction to the war, however, takes a different course by taking up the concept of the human as a troubling category. A discourse of anti-humanism that emerges in Europe immediately after the War, is one example, and the recent theories of posthumanism are another, which refurbish the anti-humanist philosophy by focusing on issues such as human relationships to nonhuman species and to the ever-evolving technosciences. Their premise and conclusion is the same—the concept of the human as autonomous and self-determining must be displaced, as such attributes are a fiction leading to human domination and violence. “The Human Against Itself: Posthumanism in Contemporary Novels” intervenes in this discourse, arguing that if as posthumanism implies humans are the very problem to be eliminated, no coherent ethics can be established, whose operation relies on humans as agents of its principles. The current renditions of posthumanism, however, withdraw their confidence from the human and misanthropically pit the human against itself, placing hope instead in the posthuman that is always yet to come. They posit that human problems can only be resolved by the human negating itself and announcing the death of its own subjectivity. In order to explore in detail the limits of these self-annihilating visions, I turn to novels by Margaret Atwood, Octavia E. Butler, and J. M. Coetzee, which engage with posthumanist themes by re-visioning the human: Atwood by constructing genetically enhanced “superhumans,” Butler by inter-species procreation, and Coetzee by “animalizing” the human. They write as though posthumanity has already arrived, but only to reveal knowingly and unknowingly the limits of posthuman existence. In the process, the novels leave room for the possibility of critical humanism by affirming the human’s self-reflexive capacity to rethink, undo, and reconstruct itself. At a time when the very concept of the human has fallen into disfavor, the novels prompt the readers to imagine a world that does not abandon the human and the legacy of emancipatory and resistant humanism.Item Politics Of The Highly Improbable: Anticipation, Catastrophe, Security(2018-05) Kindervater, GarnetThis dissertation theorizes the politics of imagining future catastrophes and their effects on contemporary political life. Interpreting late-20th century theories of epistemology and power, it scrutinizes concerns about human insecurity and their involvement in cultural knowledge production. In its broadest sense, the research articulates the politics of how humans live (and die) today; but most critically, how such politics influence ideas as the central fabric of contemporary life. Focusing chiefly on Foucault’s notion of the dispositif, critical security studies, and untranslated thinkers in contemporary French philosophy, it conceptualizes concerns for protecting against future events. I characterize future catastrophes not as empirical realities in themselves – because they exist in the future, and therefore not at all – but as speculative constructions that nevertheless bear enormous political force. I argue that speculating about disasters animates widespread anxieties about safety and insecurity in the United States. I develop this thesis under the banner of “catastrophism,” which designates a rational orientation to future disaster and a pervasive preoccupation with insecurity and death. The concept illustrates the relationship between security expertise and political life, broadly conceived, as it is informed by imagining future catastrophes in cultural and political discourses.