Touch-sensitive : cybernetic images and replicant bodies in the post-industrial age

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Abstract

This thesis uses Deleuzian cybernetics to advance upon post-modern accounts of the
contemporary image economy. It begins with the hypothesis that the schizophrenic
behaviours of late capitalism have induced an irreparable crisis in the inherited `specular
economy' (Irigaray). This is manifested as the breakdown of the laws of generalised
equivalence between truth, value and meaning and the end of a stable signifier-signified
relationship - theorised as the escape of reality into 'hyperreality', or the world become
simulation according to Baudrillard.
It will expose the insufficiency of post-modern accounts which theorise this crisis in
representation via methods which fail to escape their own always already representational
terms and it will then rigorously follow through the implications of an image economy
which is constituted by simulations which are `genuinely' sourceless, which do not
imitate a prior reality but which rather synthesise forces and relations. To escape the
closed loop of representationalism, it will divert attention away from the signifier and
will concentrate on the sub-representational power of images to re-engineer reality and to
re-invent the limits of the body. Using the theory and practice of Deleuze, Spinoza,
Bergson, Benjamin and Virilio, it will treat images as planes of corporeal becoming - as
material entities, virtual avatars, possessional states and conductors of pre-personal affect.
Post-modem accounts which cite the overwhelming predominance of images sit
uncomfortably with the theories of French anti-ocularcentrism - accessed here via
Irigaray and Lyotard - which mark the demise of vision and its attached representational
order. This paradox requires that a new perceptual relation be mapped - figured here as
entirely corporeal, as tactile and synesthetic (Mcluhan) and therefore immersive. Both
'affect' and 'intensity', as modes of pre-personal perception, will be treated as tactile
interactions for these responses to images demand that a body be always 'in touch' with
its environment, always anorganically altering its perceptual capacities by rules of
feedback. It will be argued that in this reality studio, the body no longer perceives via a
specular light source, solid form and assumed phallocentric meaning.
The proposed synthesis between cybernetic imaging technologies, immanent perceptual
criteria and the ever-changing state of the body requires an engagement with the female
since she bears a privileged relation to this scenario. In the specular economy, women
have been assumed, like faithful images, to secondarily reproduce an underlying,
phallocentric truth. However, it will be shown that just as images can work nonrepresentationally,
so too can female bodies; on the one hand appearing representational
but on the other conducting radically subversive effects. Where bodies and images are
such simulatory becomings it will be shown how the female is neither representationally
ordered (social constructivism) nor essentially defined (biological reductivism) but is
rather cybernetically engineered. Throughout, her privileged access to the virtual realm
beyond language will be used to substantiate the major claim of this thesis that cybernetic
simulation is more concerned with the material alteration of an environment rather than
with the implementation of linguistic obligation.

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