Lexi C M K Turner
2019- : PhD Performing and Media Arts, Cornell University
2016-2017: MA Contemporary Arts Theory, Goldsmiths
2013-2016: BA Film Studies, King's College London
In 2017, Lexi completed her MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, immediately following a BA in Film Studies at Kings College London. Whilst at King's, her undergraduate dissertation analysing the representation of girls and young women in the Czechoslovak New Wave from a variety of positions including poststructuralist reflections on biopolitics and performativity, Feminist sociology and anthropology, Mulveyan gaze critique and Lee Edelman and Jack Halberstam's respective reflections on the notion of queer time. Lexi's MA thesis, "Bodies Bear Traces: Noise, Power and Perpetual Disintegration" discussed noise music's connection with sadomasochism as an investigation of the body as a site of power relations through variations on eternal recurrence and queer time, genealogy, and Eugene Thacker's concept of "demontology."
It is her desire to continue investigations through philosophy and queer, art and film theory of governmentality in an ungovernable world, and establish models of practical resistance as revealed through haptic / corporeal engagement with the avant-garde.
Research interests include:
Film/art/media/communications theory and philosophy
Poststructuralism and postmodernism (Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, Derrida, Massumi)
Queer and gender theory (Buter, Halberstam, Freeman, Edelman)
Artist’s film and moving image
Sound studies/music (extreme metal, noise, jazz, alternative)
Post/non-/humanities and ecosophy (Haraway, Hayward, Neimanis, Alaimo)
Speculative/weird realism, gothic materialism (Thacker, Negarestani, Masciandaro, Fisher)
Psychoanalysis (Lacan, Freud, Klein)
Haptic reception and aesthetics (Laura U. Marks, Linda Williams)
Address: Ithaca, New York
United States
2016-2017: MA Contemporary Arts Theory, Goldsmiths
2013-2016: BA Film Studies, King's College London
In 2017, Lexi completed her MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, immediately following a BA in Film Studies at Kings College London. Whilst at King's, her undergraduate dissertation analysing the representation of girls and young women in the Czechoslovak New Wave from a variety of positions including poststructuralist reflections on biopolitics and performativity, Feminist sociology and anthropology, Mulveyan gaze critique and Lee Edelman and Jack Halberstam's respective reflections on the notion of queer time. Lexi's MA thesis, "Bodies Bear Traces: Noise, Power and Perpetual Disintegration" discussed noise music's connection with sadomasochism as an investigation of the body as a site of power relations through variations on eternal recurrence and queer time, genealogy, and Eugene Thacker's concept of "demontology."
It is her desire to continue investigations through philosophy and queer, art and film theory of governmentality in an ungovernable world, and establish models of practical resistance as revealed through haptic / corporeal engagement with the avant-garde.
Research interests include:
Film/art/media/communications theory and philosophy
Poststructuralism and postmodernism (Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, Derrida, Massumi)
Queer and gender theory (Buter, Halberstam, Freeman, Edelman)
Artist’s film and moving image
Sound studies/music (extreme metal, noise, jazz, alternative)
Post/non-/humanities and ecosophy (Haraway, Hayward, Neimanis, Alaimo)
Speculative/weird realism, gothic materialism (Thacker, Negarestani, Masciandaro, Fisher)
Psychoanalysis (Lacan, Freud, Klein)
Haptic reception and aesthetics (Laura U. Marks, Linda Williams)
Address: Ithaca, New York
United States
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Papers by Lexi C M K Turner
For many readers, Nietzsche exists as a philosophical paradox – a classicist in his studies, his writing contributes to and comments upon the notion of a break from tradition establish him as one of the driving forces of the modernist era. And yet, the greatest appraisals and analyses of Nietzsche’s work are at the hands of postmodernists and poststructuralists, not least of all Deleuze, Foucault and Butler. Such a paradox may be paralleled in the very concept of a Queer Modernist inquiry, considering that, by many accounts, queer theory is itself all but entirely rooted in postmodernist thought.
A solution to these paradoxes may be found through further investigation of the elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy that held such influence over postmodern theory: that of time. Between Deleuze’s reflections and elevation of Nietzsche’s proposition of eternal recurrence to the status a legitimate cosmological theory of the repetition of difference-in-itself and the continuation of generalities, and Foucault’s discussion of genealogy as analysis of the historical implications of incorporation, we break free from linearly chronological constraints.
Similarly, Elizabeth Freeman argues, queer sexual interaction, through the medium of the historically “theatrical” roleplaying sadomasochistic encounter, “us[es] the body as an instrument to rearrange time, becom[ing] a kind of écriture historique,” creating sensational echoes of the results of penal discipline centuries before, now abstracted into pleasures of repetition, within and despite the cyclical recurrence of kyriarchal generality.
Applying through queer performance and sexuality Nietzsche’s philosophy in relation to the body and time, as well as remarking on the distinct similarities between Nietzsche’s theory of incorporation and Butler’s work on gender performativity, Nietzsche’s relationship with dance and musicality on his own literature becomes reinvigorated from a queer perspective. We may ask how the drag balls of Paris is Burning up to today, with their eloquent investigation of the power relations inherent in gender expression, relate to the modernist ballet, according to Susan jones, deeply influenced by Nietzsche’s “rediscovery” of the Dionysian.
Ultimately, we must ask: in a world of queer-historical erasure at the hands of cisheteropatriarchal hegemonic generality, how may we as queers understand differently the call for affirmation Nietzsche makes in relation to the supposed horror of eternal recurrence?
The resemblance of this mass to the Lacanian concept of the Gestalt in addition to the influence of the establishment of privatisation via enclosures / borders allows for the abjection of accused witches to the stake and gallows (as well as criminals to Australia, slaves to the Americas etc) renders this phenomenon not merely an opportunity for comparison, but instead of actual Kristevan psychoanalysis. The mass-population-society built on capital operates as the Gestalt of one hive-mind, with the inherited neuroses of any subject aiming towards the idealised imago, thus abjecting bodies the way an individual abjects materials. Rather than society necessarily behaving as a “big Other,” it may therefore be useful to understand it rather as a “big Self.” Neurotic and paranoid, the system of Capital’s sense of inevitability and immutability may be caused by its parallel to the ideological constitution of one’s subjectivity. Therefore, if we are to break from the system of Capital, it may first be necessary to readdress bodies and concepts rendered abject by our own psyche, and strive to undo our very formation of self.
For many readers, Nietzsche exists as a philosophical paradox – a classicist in his studies, his writing contributes to and comments upon the notion of a break from tradition establish him as one of the driving forces of the modernist era. And yet, the greatest appraisals and analyses of Nietzsche’s work are at the hands of postmodernists and poststructuralists, not least of all Deleuze, Foucault and Butler. Such a paradox may be paralleled in the very concept of a Queer Modernist inquiry, considering that, by many accounts, queer theory is itself all but entirely rooted in postmodernist thought.
A solution to these paradoxes may be found through further investigation of the elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy that held such influence over postmodern theory: that of time. Between Deleuze’s reflections and elevation of Nietzsche’s proposition of eternal recurrence to the status a legitimate cosmological theory of the repetition of difference-in-itself and the continuation of generalities, and Foucault’s discussion of genealogy as analysis of the historical implications of incorporation, we break free from linearly chronological constraints.
Similarly, Elizabeth Freeman argues, queer sexual interaction, through the medium of the historically “theatrical” roleplaying sadomasochistic encounter, “us[es] the body as an instrument to rearrange time, becom[ing] a kind of écriture historique,” creating sensational echoes of the results of penal discipline centuries before, now abstracted into pleasures of repetition, within and despite the cyclical recurrence of kyriarchal generality.
Applying through queer performance and sexuality Nietzsche’s philosophy in relation to the body and time, as well as remarking on the distinct similarities between Nietzsche’s theory of incorporation and Butler’s work on gender performativity, Nietzsche’s relationship with dance and musicality on his own literature becomes reinvigorated from a queer perspective. We may ask how the drag balls of Paris is Burning up to today, with their eloquent investigation of the power relations inherent in gender expression, relate to the modernist ballet, according to Susan jones, deeply influenced by Nietzsche’s “rediscovery” of the Dionysian.
Ultimately, we must ask: in a world of queer-historical erasure at the hands of cisheteropatriarchal hegemonic generality, how may we as queers understand differently the call for affirmation Nietzsche makes in relation to the supposed horror of eternal recurrence?
The resemblance of this mass to the Lacanian concept of the Gestalt in addition to the influence of the establishment of privatisation via enclosures / borders allows for the abjection of accused witches to the stake and gallows (as well as criminals to Australia, slaves to the Americas etc) renders this phenomenon not merely an opportunity for comparison, but instead of actual Kristevan psychoanalysis. The mass-population-society built on capital operates as the Gestalt of one hive-mind, with the inherited neuroses of any subject aiming towards the idealised imago, thus abjecting bodies the way an individual abjects materials. Rather than society necessarily behaving as a “big Other,” it may therefore be useful to understand it rather as a “big Self.” Neurotic and paranoid, the system of Capital’s sense of inevitability and immutability may be caused by its parallel to the ideological constitution of one’s subjectivity. Therefore, if we are to break from the system of Capital, it may first be necessary to readdress bodies and concepts rendered abject by our own psyche, and strive to undo our very formation of self.