Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Thesis Format

Monograph

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Art and Visual Culture

Supervisor

Sprengler, Christine

2nd Supervisor

Mahon, Patrick

3rd Supervisor

Migone, Christof

Abstract

Is it possible to conceptualize a new interpretation of melancholy, one that pertains not to subjective experience but to the nonhuman? Through various case studies of contemporary art, I approach this question through a speculative realist interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari’s machine ontology, Levi Bryant’s machine-oriented ontology, and Reza Negarestani’s conceptions of decay. Nonhuman melancholy is ultimately conceived through several characteristics of disintegration: withdrawal, disintegrative asignifiance (asymbolia), temporal indeterminacy, and corpo-motor retardation (deceleration). Each case study focuses on different manifestations of nonhuman melancholy. First, melancholy is embodied in objects on a material level. On a larger scale, its symptoms are engaged within the unstable operations of capitalism. Lastly, melancholy is observed in digital procedures. Objects, or machines, are haunted with varying degrees of darkness in relation to the death drive and varying levels of antiproduction seeping from the body without organs. Memento mori in this context serves both as a diffracted trope in visual culture and as a process of substantial decomposition. Nonhuman melancholy’s operational purpose is proposed as a series of procedures serving the anti-rigidity and softening of substance, whether this is manifested in material decay, in the shifting systems of capitalism, in digital images, or in the algorithmic black box of the computational gaze.

Summary for Lay Audience

Is it possible to think about melancholy outside of subjective experience and to resituate it as something that also afflicts nonhuman entities? Through various case studies of contemporary art, I approach this question through acute analyses of artworks using the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, Levi R. Bryant, and Reza Negarestani to contemplate on the relationship between decay and melancholy. Nonhuman melancholy is ultimately conceived through several characteristics of disintegration, such as withdrawal, loss of symbolic coherence, temporal indeterminacy, and deceleration. Following Bryant, I propose that objects are haunted with varying degrees of darkness, but in relation to the death drive—or the drive toward mortal deterioration—and forces that resist organization. The memento mori motif in this context becomes diffused, both as a trope in visual culture and as a process of material decay. I propose that nonhuman melancholy serves the purpose of loosening or softening substances and organizational structures, even those pertaining to the rigidity of digital processes.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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