Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Thesis Format

Monograph

Degree

Master of Arts

Program

Theory and Criticism

Supervisor

Schuster, Joshua

Abstract

This thesis is a genealogy of the following thinkers: Karl Marx, Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari and Nick Land insofar as particular works of these thinkers, when strung together, increasingly center the technological as controlling and process of production. When moving through the works of these thinkers, a direct correlation is uncovered - between the technological taking control of the productive process, and man losing control of it; wherein the technological instantiates itself on the backs of humanity’s disintegration. A question regarding how one may live amidst times of nihilistic precarity is also addressed in this thesis, with the answer being found in aesthetic autonomy and self-gratifying excess.

Summary for Lay Audience

This thesis genealogically maps the works of Marx, Deleuze/Guattari and Land – unfolding the role of the productive process insofar as it increasingly centers the technological, and directly entails the disintegration of man. Namely, in such a mapping, the productive process increases in importance, while man and his innate creative ability (his species being - insofar as it is a human capacity) decreases. The first chapter defines the productive process via an exploration of both economic and philosophic theory. Using the 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts, the concept of species being is then explored as an innate anthropocentricism establishing man as a creative, promethean figure at the center of the productive process - in control of his own labour power and of technology and thus of historical/societal change. The later works of Marx, however, centers the productive forces (technology and labour power) as the primary motor undergirding the productive process, undermining man’s species being whilst promoting the technological.

Species being is further undermined in the second chapter, through Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, wherein man morphs into a technological figure – a post-human. Finally, in Nick Land’s work Fanged Noumena, it is the technological, defined by a capitalism-AI composite at the helm of the productive process, birthing itself from the future point in time known as the Technological Singularity (wherein technological development has far surpassed the control of man). The final chapter of this work discusses the practical plausibility of such a theoretical trajectory– answering question regarding the plausibility of the exponential development of both capitalism and the technological. Finally, this thesis will end by arguing that if one presupposes exponential technological development in direct correlation to the disintegration of human species being, one possible way to live alongside the productive process is to embrace the aesthetic and subjective experimentation of such a process.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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