INVESTIGATING EMERGING DELEUZOGUATTARIAN CONNECTIONS TO THE ENVIRONMENT VIA INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY J. SIWAK 2016 INVESTIGATING EMERGING DELEUZOGUATTARIAN CONNECTIONS TO THE ENVIRONMENT VIA INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY By Jakub Siwak Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy: Media Studies (Research) in the Faculty of Arts at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University 2016 Supervisor: Prof A Konik Declaration I, Jakub Siwak, hereby declare that Investigating Emerging Deleuzoguattarian Connections to the Environment via Information Technology is my own work, and has not previously been submitted for assessment to another University or for another qualification. Further, all the sources that I have used and/or quoted within this work have been clearly indicated and acknowledged by complete references. 29 June 2016 Jakub Siwak _________________________ Table of contents Summary i Acknowledgments iii Introduction 1 Chapter One: The environmental crisis through the lens of legacy mass media within the context of economic globalization 12 The mass media and growing popular awareness of the environmental crisis 13 Institutional responses to the environmental crisis 19 The parameters of environmental degradation today 28 The Dominant Social Paradigm 35 Conclusion 41 Chapter Two: Rethinking the technological dimension of the DSP: Information technology and the environment 43 Information technology and neoliberalism: Connectivity and commerce 44 The material infrastructure underpinning our digital world 51 Questioning the relationship between technology and nature 59 Conclusion 68 Chapter Three: Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-animal, and the digital wall 70 Deleuze’s historical context: The 1960s as a decade of change 71 Deleuze’s academic context: Nietzsche, Hegelianism and micro-narratives 78 Deleuze, difference, and desire 81 Deleuze and Guattari on desubjectivation through becoming-animal 93 The digital challenge to difference: Deleuze’s “Postscript on Control Societies” 100 Conclusion 104 Chapter Four: Contemporary reflections on Deleuze’s concern over digitality, and resonances between Deleuze’s ‘counter-information’ and Guattari’s ‘post-media’ 105 Reflections of Deleuze’s pessimism over digitality in contemporary theory 106 Deleuze and counter-information 117 Deleuze’s counter-information in contemporary digital theorization 118 Guattari and post-media 123 Guattari’s post-media in contemporary digital theorization 130 Conclusion 137 Chapter Five: Deleuze, durationality, difference, and digitality 139 Nietzsche, duration and Deleuze 140 Proust, duration and Deleuze 150 Bergson, duration and Deleuze 156 Deleuze and duration in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 164 Analog duration versus digital information 177 Digitality and difference 181 Conclusion 186 Chapter Six: Emerging connections to the environment: Hybrid digital durationalities 188 First-order hybrid durationality: The Tamagotchi 189 Second-order hybrid durationality: Botanicula 198 Third-order hybrid durationality: Shark Net and Ocearch 206 Conclusion 224 Conclusion 229 Bibliography 238 i Summary This thesis explores whether or not it is possible to positively inflect – via digital means – people’s orientations toward nature through connecting their duration to the time of animals. The thesis opens with an overview of the contemporary environmental crisis, mapping related significant discourses, events and responses from the early 1960s onward. In this regard, after thematizing the relatively ineffective global institutional response to the environmental crisis to date – in spite of both consistent criticisms proffered by a range of stakeholders and widely available information on the scope of current environmental degradation – the lack of any concerted effort to deal with this issue is accounted for in terms of the dimensions of what Kilbourne, Beckmann and Thelen refer to as the ‘Dominant Social Paradigm’ (DSP). However, it is argued that of these dimensions, the technological dimension is most amenable to pro-environmental inflection, particularly through recent developments within information technology. That is, despite the latter being the privileged technology of neoliberalism, and despite the environmental cost of its current material infrastructure, it is also highly unlikely that societies will abandon their dependence on information technology in the near future. Given this, the importance of considering how such technology can be harnessed to positively re-orientate users’ perceptions of the natural world, in a way that also avoids the pitfall of technophilia, is advanced. In terms of this, both positive and negative appraisals of information technology by prominent new media theorists are discussed, and information technology is put forward as a tool that remains indeterminate in terms of its use. After this, and with a view to exploring how the technological dimension of the DSP might possibly be inflected in a pro-environmental manner, the thesis draws on the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who promote desire and difference outside the ambit of capitalism, particularly through desubjectivation in relation to their concept of ‘becoming-animal.’ Finally, after dealing in addition with some potential theoretical challenges to the application of Deleuze’s ideas within the digital realm, focus shifts to three contemporary digital artefacts which have the capacity, albeit to varying degrees, to facilitate a becoming-animal. In this regard, a distinction is made between those artefacts that precipitate first-, second- and third-order hybrid durationality, and it is argued that the latter category presents the greatest promise of interfacing the time of humans with the time of animals. ii Key words: environmental crisis, neoliberalism, paradigm, information technology, counter- information, post-media, duration, hybridity iii Acknowledgments I am very grateful to my supervisor Prof. Adrian Konik for his excellent supervision, and his many insights into the work of Deleuze, whom I found a very challenging theorist to contend with. It was wonderful to work with such a dedicated supervisor, who pushed me hard, but was always very fair and incredibly supportive. I would also like to thank my fellow doctoral student, Corne du Plessis, for the many helpful discussions we had on our respective topics, as well as my family, colleagues, and friends who supported me over the last three and a half years. Mostly, I would like to thank my wife, Katerina Siwak, because it is no exaggeration that I simply would not have been able to make it to the point of submission without her. Thank you. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the financial support provided for this doctoral study by the Department of Research Capacity Development of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. The financial assistance of the National Research Foundation (NRF) towards this research is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at, are those of the author and are not necessarily to be attributed to the NRF. 1 Introduction Just over four years ago, my wife showed me a curious application on her smartphone. I was admittedly only vaguely interested at the time, and watched somewhat impatiently as the phone struggled to load the new app. What appeared once it had loaded was a confusing set of points mapped out along the southern coastline of South Africa. We zoomed in toward the digitally-represented shores of the Eastern Cape, and zeroed in on the waters of Port Elizabeth. And as we did so, the points – or rather, dots – appeared less frequently along the map. This did not trouble me at first, and I remained only marginally focused on the visuals in front of us, and asked the question I should perhaps have asked up front: “So, what are these dots?” My wife grinned in anticipation of delivering a surprising revelation, and then replied: “Sharks active, right now, right here in PE.” We zoomed in as close as we could, and sure enough, there was one coasting along in Algoa Bay, but none lurking around Pollock Beach and Sardinia Bay. Another, though, seemed to be getting really close to the shore at Jeffrey’s Bay. The tagged sharks had names, and you could track them exclusively – if an individual shark passed a receptor beacon, a signal would be sent to the user’s phone. We picked one whose name I don’t remember, and waited for a ping from the netherworld; it did not come, and after a few minutes it struck me as incredibly strange that we had been sitting at a phone, waiting for a message from a shark. But late that night, as I was reading, her phone pinged, and I experienced a strange sense of wonder at the thought that out there in the cold darkness of the ocean, slowly and silently, a great white leviathan was moving forward through space and time – and into my time and space through the message it had just sent to us. Probably on account of the many uncomplimentary images of sharks spread through popular culture and the mass media, I had up until that point regarded them as rather loathsome creatures, who chiefly comprised a threat to the health and wellbeing of humans. But in that moment I encountered one differently, as a creature in its own world, quietly pursuing its own ends, without compassion, without remorse, without hatred; a perfect predator who beneath the bioluminescent surface of the water appeared to me for the first time beautiful. At the time I was preparing for doctoral study, and reading up on environmentalism and