COMPOSING A DIONYSIAN MACHINE: THE LOGIC OF RESONANCE IN POST-QUALITATIVE INQUIRY by WILLIAM A. LEWIS (Under the Direction of Elli Lester Roushanzamir) ABSTRACT This dissertation process is a Dionysian machine opening space for the yet to come through a logic of resonance. It aims to highlight the potential in resonance, sound, and music to create more open meanings than those found in language’s conventional binary logic. Focusing on resonance as something real and abstract that is useful for the questioning of systems of thought led to a method of new empirical paradoxical composition that calls for a post- representational conversion functioning before any determined ontology. Therefore, this document is a multi-layered narrative, or composition, constructed to incite a creative activity of thought through a logic of resonance, rather than provide specific findings within an established regime of truth. Conventional humanist qualitative inquiry and its confining standards of validity are brought into question and playfully ruptured, replacing judgment that relies on a logic of specialization with a valorization of creativity and wonder. This machine works to make room for art and philosophy in the discipline of mass communication. A proposal for an ontogenetic communication, that breaks from the binary sender-receiver model and uses the constitutive potential of an aesthetic and musical approach, is composed. Also, a design for a Dionysian instrument is presented, and a story about a black bag floating in the waves. INDEX WORDS: Affirmation, Immanence, Mass Communication, Music, Narrative, New Empiricism, Nomadic Composition, Paradox, Pataphysics, Post- representation, Post-qualitative, Process Philosophy, Resonance COMPOSING A DIONYSIAN MACHINE: THE LOGIC OF RESONANCE IN POST-QUALITATIVE INQUIRY by WILLIAM A. LEWIS BA Mercer University 2008 MA University of Georgia 2013 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2017 © 2017 William A. Lewis All Rights Reserved COMPOSING A DIONYSIAN MACHINE: THE LOGIC OF RESONANCE IN POST-QUALITATIVE INQUIRY by WILLIAM A. LEWIS Major Professor: Elli Lester Roushanzamir Committee: Carolina Acosta-Alzuru Valerie Boyd Elizabeth A. St. Pierre Electronic Version Approved: Suzanne Barbour Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2017 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1 2 WRITING FRIENDS OF WISDOM .............................................................................6 Introduction ..............................................................................................................6 Friends of Wisdom and Wonder ............................................................................13 Friends of Wisdom and Academic Writing ...........................................................16 Friends of Wisdom and the Storyteller ..................................................................22 Friends of Wisdom and a New Mass Communication ..........................................31 Friends of Wisdom and Neo-liberalism in Education ............................................34 Friends of Wisdom and Power ...............................................................................37 3 POST-QUALITATIVE INQUIRY IN MASS COMMUNICATION .........................42 Introduction ............................................................................................................43 Critique of the Valorization of Presence ................................................................45 Post-Qualitative Inquiry .........................................................................................53 Play in Logic and Language ..................................................................................57 Refusing Human Being for a Subjectless Subject .................................................66 New Empirical Paradoxical Composition ..............................................................69 4 FOR A DIONYSIAN MACHINE ...............................................................................79 v Introduction ............................................................................................................79 Music, Language, and Reality ...............................................................................81 The Tanpura and Resonance ..................................................................................83 Art, Performance, Interactivity, and the Problem of Instrumentality ....................84 Machine Solvency ................................................................................................109 5 ONTOGENETIC COMMUNICATION AND THE YET TO COME .....................123 Introduction ..........................................................................................................123 The Theory of the Sign ........................................................................................129 For a Resonant Nervous System and the Transmutation of Self .........................134 6 THE TALE OF A BLACK BAG IN THE WAVES .................................................140 ENDNOTES .............................................................................................................................143 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................147 vi LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1: Ph. O. Runge, Perspektivissche Konstruction einer Wendeltreppe (Roob, 2014) .........31 Figure 2: W. Blake, The Gates of Paradise, 1973 (Roob, 2014) ...................................................31 Figure 3: A Dionysian Instrument (Lewis, 2017) ..........................................................................84 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In an attempt to obtain a doctorate in the discipline of mass communication, the following dissertation was composed under specific guidelines of the presiding institution. Few limitations held, however, this document’s position as a dissertation written for a specific credential enters it into a particular power relation worth noting in a traditional beginning. One of the immediately visible differences from other dissertations is found in the extravagant use of block quotations. My hope is that a new rhythm and logic emerges with the reordering of meanings and breaking of contexts. Instead of providing concrete information within a specific system of knowledge, the aim is to compose a paradoxical piece that resonates intensely, inciting creativity and thought more than proving a specific point to be true. Instead of using the logic of mutual exclusion that comes with the contradictions of information and truth, this composition uses a logic of resonance that mutually includes; a logic of the And zoomed out from the either/or. While language inherently involves the double-sided in opposition, the logic of the binary always has more room for play than realized. This dissertation explores music, noise, and resonance as more open forms of communication that break from the enlightenment humanist model that assumes a sender and a receiver. It calls for the concept of communication to be decentered and opened up to a new frame functioning in a space before any determined subject. The concept of resonance applied to language and communication calls for something less concerned with communicating specific meanings and information, and more concerned with inciting an activity of thought and lines of 2 flight. The argument is for a logic that makes space for wonder and the yet to come. Decentering language’s dominant binary logic and piecing it back together more resonantly, where new understandings can emerge differently. Communicating with a new logic that is always already echoing back. The inevitable return of what never was. This composition could also be understood as a narrative. While not starting in the traditional humanist space that assumes the Cartesian subject, the cogito, this narrative has no specific storyteller or narrator. This narrative starts somewhere and nowhere. Zoomed out, not as a satellite floating in space looking down at Earth, but zoomed out from the concrete subject/object that is being constituted through the binary logic of language. Zoomed out before anything comes together. This narrative is always becoming rather than a retrospective processing of information, or reflection of a memory. A narrative of the bare experience of the event, the resonance of becoming experience. Massumi (2011/2013) explained: It’s artificial to talk about this only in relation to single things. Every thing appears in a situation, along with others. The situation itself is a life-drop. A bigger drop, with its own ripples of potential that overlap with those of its constituent things but can also diverge from them, subtract them from itself or alloy them in other configurations. Every appearance is at the crossroads of life. At the limit, what appears isn’t just a drop or a pool, but a whole ocean, with calm stretches and turbulence, ripplings that cancel each other out and others that combine and amplify, with crests and troughs, killer surf-breaks and gentle lappings at the shores of