UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Dark Ecologies of Knowledges: A Postphenomenological Approach to Architectonics as Terraprocess Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/09x9h2jk Author Taksony Hewitt, Jason Timothy Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Dark Ecologies of Knowledges: A Postphenomenological Approach to Architectonics as Terraprocess A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information Studies by Jason Timothy Taksony Hewitt 2014 © Copyright by Jason Timothy Taksony Hewitt 2014 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Dark Ecologies of Knowledges: A Postphenomenological Approach to Architectonics as Terraprocess by Jason Timothy Taksony Hewitt Doctor of Philosophy in Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles, 2014 Professor Jonathan Furner, Chair This series of essays offers a critique of Information Studies, taken as a discipline largely concerned with informational objects and their representations on the one hand and the control of these same by means of other informational objects and their representations on the other. Spe- cifically, the critique put forward here attends to the ways that the common practices of Infor- mation Studies may reinforce representationalist ideologies that are historically problematic and that are likely to continue to be so into the future if allowed to persist. Such ideologies are bound up with histories of oppression, colonialism, and cognitive injustice in ways that seem likely to be undesirable to most practitioners upon consideration. The critique offered seeks to point out this conjunction of aesthetic and ethical issues in our practical epistemological constructs, open- ing out largely untried avenues of exploration with regard to our axiological habits—axiology ii being defined here as the inquiry that includes ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology—and the ar- chitectonic structures of meaning and understanding that we deploy with ever increasing density in (and occasionally as) the world. In the related field of semiotics, an assumption, bordering on a principle, obtains that meaning has structure and that that meaning is intelligible. The work of semiotic theorists has shown that this is not likely to be exclusively a logocentric prejudice. The works of Gilles Deleuze and his sometimes partner Felix Guattari, along with those of C.S. Peirce and Justus Buchler, each postulate in their own way that meaning and its structure are continuous with the world, and, going further, that the structures of meaning that exist in the world have no intrinsic limit to their complexity in a general sense other than the availability of resources to build that complexity. This is not equivalent to saying that the forms of such complexity are unlimited in the sense that they could take all possible forms, though the number of possible form-states may be infinite in principle when the availability of resources is bracketed off as a concern. That indi- cates to us the likelihood that no single ideology gives us a complete picture of all possible semi- otic modalities and that, with sufficient resources, multiple modalities may coexist and interact in a single system, event, or order. All of this places semiosis in a thermodynamic milieu between complex systems theory and computation theory, even while suggesting analogies to ecophe- nomenology and ecosystems thinking as an interpretation of Peircean "infinite semiosis." While semiotics, as an architectonic discipline, traces continuities with the Kantian para- digm, the Deleuzean approach represents a turn in philosophy both in expressive style and ways of doing philosophy, such that both a reinvestigation of semiotic structures and the production of new rhetorical modes are suggested in light of it—though Deleuze is a threshold for such mat- ters, not a container. Making use of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Niklas Luhmann, iii Luciano Floridi, and François Laruelle (as well as Patrick Wilson, Marcia Bates, and Jonathan Furner) to construct an ordinal semiotic compatible with various structural realisms, the argu- ments here commit to a pataphysical and hermetic swerve that aligns with the "Dark Deleuzean" aesthetics of Nick Land and Reza Negarestani, exploring the metaphor of darkness itself by way of the immanence theories of Timothy Morton and Eugene Thacker. The argument pattern de- scribed can be seen as an affirmation of possibly novel values of global, transspecies cognitive justice and "cognitive veganism" at least partially consistent with the ethical concerns and imag- es of thought of such thinkers as Richard Kahn and Stephen David Ross. Due to the emphasis on continuity with the world, the above motivates us to take serious- ly various posthumanistic rhetorics' priorities: cybernetics, informatics, thermodynamics, com- plex and autopoietic systems, codality, cognitive and neuro-diversity, enhanced and artificial in- telligence, postvitalist ecology, and perhaps even Singularity. Because of that same continuity, each of these should be necessarily thought in relation to planetarity and global history. Through that thought we can understand semiotic processes and ecologies as bound up with what Land has called a "terraprocess." Information Studies, as a discipline emerging into full fruition within the context of a posthumanistic moment, situated in turn within the Anthropocene Era, should understand and engage with this terraprocess as the architectonic syntax for a more fundamental informatic and metainformatic axiology. iv The dissertation of Jason Timothy Taksony Hewitt is approved. Johanna Drucker Anne Gilliland Richard Kahn Jonathan Furner, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2014 v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................. viii Vita ..................................................................................................................................................... ix 1. Prelude: Misanthropology ............................................................................................................ 2 2. Against Being ............................................................................................................................... 16 3. Interlude: Some Cartilage ............................................................................................................. 72 4. Dark Methods ............................................................................................................................... 74 5. Interlude: Sutures ....................................................................................................................... 122 6. Demiurge ..................................................................................................................................... 126 7. Conception .................................................................................................................................. 179 8. Interlude: In the Cracks ............................................................................................................. 224 9. The Stranger ............................................................................................................................... 232 10. Bathophilia ............................................................................................................................... 254 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................... 262 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 The Cartesian Cogito ................................................................................................................... 85 Figure 2 The Lacanian Ego ......................................................................................................................... 85 Figure 3 Classical Notes ........................................................................................................................... 166 Figure 4 Philip Glass, Opening of "Glassworks" ...................................................................................... 167 Figure 5 Wilden's Diagram ...................................................................................................................... 236 vii Acknowledgments I would like to thank several individuals for their support in my work on this dissertation. First and foremost, my gratitude and profound love go to Sean Taksony, my patient husband, who endured long hours of my work and the occasional temper tantrum as I tried to convince my brain to do things it probably isn’t capable of doing very well. Of course, my deep appreciation goes to Reginald Ray, my teacher, mentor, and friend, and to the Ven. René Feusi. I cannot fail to thank Jerry Irish, Zayn Kassam, Bill Whedbee, Peggy Dornish, Nona Olivia, Jean-François Blanchette, Marcia Bates, or Christine Borgman for the assistance and guidance they have given me over the years and for their infinite kindness. My dear friends Chris and Goni Bissell and Bryce and Judith Campbell have kept me sane and dedicated as I have undertaken this difficult task. Without them, this would not have happened. Jillian Wallis has been a support in life, friendship,