Papers by Patricia Clough
Didier Debaise's Nature as Event like his Speculative Empiricism adds to the more than decade lon... more Didier Debaise's Nature as Event like his Speculative Empiricism adds to the more than decade long focus on the other-than-human among critical theorists, philosophers and media studies scholars that has brought them to reconsider Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy or as Debasie would put it Whitehead's cosmology, especially expressed in his critique of the bifurcation of nature. Debaise's return to the bifurcation of nature, is meant to offer a necessary correction to what has been the predominant understanding of it as a critique of dualism, beginning with the Cartesian dualism. For Debaise this
Intro to my recently published book: The User Unconscious: Affect, Media and Measure
Introduction The User Unconscious: Affect, Media and Measure At a time when it seems urgent to re... more Introduction The User Unconscious: Affect, Media and Measure At a time when it seems urgent to re-envision the potential for productive interventions in the present and near future, the essays collected here look to the past two decades of the twenty-first century. Originally published between 2007 and 2016, the essays were written in the aftermath of the bombing of the World Trade Center, the 2008 financial crisis, and the worldwide intensification of militarism and policing, leading me to grapple with the tightening relationship of neoliberalism, biopolitics, and the expansion of digital media and computational technologies. During this time I also turned my attention to affect, objects, and other-than-human agencies, exploring the perspectives of speculative realisms, object-oriented ontologies and new materialisms as well as engaging in analyses of media, especially the digital media and computational technologies that provide the infrastructure for the expansion and multiplication of the operations and functions of social media, the internet, and technologies of surveillance and control. Taken together, the essays point to what early twenty-first century critical theory, philosophy and media studies still have to offer us in facing the near future as digital media and computational technologies, neoliberalism, and biopolitics continue to reach into the ontological grounds of human subjectivity and sociality, both in their operating on nonconscious, bodily responses or affect and in their flooding the domain of connectivity with other-than-human agencies or datafication. Moving from the affective turn to the datalogical turn, the essays
Social Text, 2015
In Spring 2015, Social Text published an issue in memoriam of the influential sociologist Randy M... more In Spring 2015, Social Text published an issue in memoriam of the influential sociologist Randy Martin.
In the introduction to his book Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost suggests that philosophers ought ... more In the introduction to his book Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost suggests that philosophers ought not just write philosophy, at least not without practicing, doing, or making. He urges engagement in -carpentry‖: -constructing artifacts that do philosophy.‖ 1 Bogost adds to Graham Harman's take on -the carpentry of things‖ -the carpentry of hands-on craftsmanship, ‖ further proposing that -carpentry entails making things that explain how things make their world.‖ 2 Bogost's examples, his own software productions for what he envisions as -platform studies,‖ suggest a link between object-oriented ontology and digital or informational technologies and the crisis of form in the presentation of content that online communication is evoking. While not all the philosophers who now are engaged with object-oriented ontology necessarily would link their work to technology and its instigation of a crisis of form, I find it helpful to pursue this link for a discussion of the app.
The very title, Neuro, might quickly and quite rightly suggest to the reader that Nikolas Rose's ... more The very title, Neuro, might quickly and quite rightly suggest to the reader that Nikolas Rose's and Joelle Abi-Rached's book length treatment of the "new brain sciences and the management of the mind" is meant to show how neuro-has become attached to numerous disciplines and practices. In a very short time, the prefix has given us neuropsychology, neuropsychiatry, neuropsychoanalysis, neurophilosophy, neuroethics, neuroaesthetics, neuromarketing, neurotherapies and neurotechnologies to name some few. Arguing that these disciplines and practices are con/temporary end points in genealogies of research on the nerves, the brain and mental illness, Rose and Abi-Rached do not offer a linear history of neuroscientific progress. Rather Neuro marks that point in time, 1962 as the authors see it, at which these three research paths converge to create the conditions for the eventful arrival of the neurosciences.
…the emergence of a new media is too violent and superstimulated a social experience for the cent... more …the emergence of a new media is too violent and superstimulated a social experience for the central nervous system simply to endure." Marshal McLuhan (1994, 43).
This article offers a review of the relationship of methodological positivism and post-World War ... more This article offers a review of the relationship of methodological positivism and post-World War II U.S. sociology, especially its transformations in the last three decades of the twentieth century. With this as context, sociological methodology is rethought in terms of what cultural critics refer to as infraempiricism that allows for a rethinking of bodies, matter and life through new encounters with visceral perception and pre-conscious affect. Thinking infra-empiricism as a new empiricism at this time means rethinking infraempiricism in relationship to the changing configuration of economy, governance disciplinarity and control in the early twenty-first century.
There is no ontology that does not legislate for its own empowerment technologcially in the sense... more There is no ontology that does not legislate for its own empowerment technologcially in the sense of prescribing the means for its own enablement and … there is no technology that is not an expression of ontology, of presumptions concerning the fundaments of existence said to enable technology to be technological (Dillon, 2003: 547)
A certain engagement with Freud is announced right at the start of Lauren Berlant's essay, Cruel ... more A certain engagement with Freud is announced right at the start of Lauren Berlant's essay, Cruel Optimism, when she proposes that the "object of desire" "really is" about something that is not quite an object, maybe not an object at all, but rather "a cluster of promises" (2006, 20). And there also is a certain passivity elaborated as the cluster of promises are defined as ones "we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us" (20). Cruel optimism then is about a transaction, an exchange that is both transferential and optimistically transformative. It is this transaction and how it turns optimism cruel that requires a politicizing of Freud's insights, what we might take Cruel Optimism to be. Another gem in her collection of essays that are meant to collect and critically engage public feelings, Berlant's Cruel Optimism is something less than a character study and something more than a cultural analysis of public opinion. It is something more like a psychoanalysis of sociality, a psychoanalysis however that acknowledges that political economy "must run along side" it (27). The political economic analysis that Cruel Optimism offers is not just about living during a specific stage of capitalism but more about a feeling that might well be endemic to capitalism: an economy that operates, if not from the very start, then surely increasingly, by distributing unequally the "chops" or affective capacity to turn fantasy into a plan rather than it become a prison, a removal of oneself from further exchange, not by choice but by compulsion, a relentless staying attached to the "very animating potency, of an object/scene of desire" that contributes to "the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of attachment" (21).This compulsion is not an addiction, not a melancholia, but a repetitious enactment, defending the attachment in advance of its loss.
Roderick Ferguson"s The Reorder of Things is a rich and provocative genealogy of a mode of power ... more Roderick Ferguson"s The Reorder of Things is a rich and provocative genealogy of a mode of power that came into being along with the interdisciplinary subversion of that classical figure-the Man of Michel Foucault"s The Order of Things. Beginning in the late 1960s, this subversion was carried out by those engaged in what Ferguson calls the interdisciplines, such as ethnic studies, black studies, Puerto Rican studies, women studies, queer studies, and post-colonial studies. In giving us the disturbing history of these interdisciplines, the Reorder of Things focuses on institutional arrangements and the material practices of bureaucracy, a sociology of sorts that also draws on the writings of
Viscosity, the heat the oil drips down my cheek. As I sit, my feet barely touching the floor, the... more Viscosity, the heat the oil drips down my cheek. As I sit, my feet barely touching the floor, the exorcism begins right there in a chair, up against the kitchen sink. Frightened and fascinated too I look up into her face over me into the small black centers of her eyes.
Written to retrace the affects of childhood experience expressed in the themes that inform my sch... more Written to retrace the affects of childhood experience expressed in the themes that inform my scholarship-unconscious desire, affect, bodies, sexuality, race, politics, and media/biotechnologies, what follows focuses on belief, trauma and the rhythm of family violence in the repeating beating of punishment, prayer, music and the poetic. The work of remembering has been informed by revisiting the place where I grew up, walking the same streets I walked as a little girl, attempting to capture in photographs what I saw and could not see then. But remembering remains incomplete; it does not put an end to the repeating beating, thereby necessitating an experimental writing style that allows for the breaks in memory, while making apparent the irrational cutting between childhood experiences and scholarship. i
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Papers by Patricia Clough