Fernandes, Megan Kristina (Author)
Huang, Yunte
University of California, Santa Barbara
LeMenager, Stephanie
Huang, Yunte
Monahan, Laurie
Ghosh, Bishnupriya
LeMenager, Stephanie
Monahan, Laurie
Edition Details: Advisor: Ghosh, Bishnupriya; Committee Members: LeMenager, Stephanie, Huang, Yunte, Monahan, Laurie.
Physical Details: 264 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation presents a series of studies in the aesthetics of vital matter, examining their trans-corporeality in a range of cultural artifacts produced by what Nikolas Rose has come to call the "molecularization of vitality" (13). In The Politics of Life Itself , Rose discusses molecularity as a mode or practice, a way of imagining a new vitality and permeability between bodies that now is open to aesthetic-political analysis. This vitality, Rose argues, is related to the new mobility of vital elements, the ways in which "Molecularization strips tissues, proteins, molecules and drugs of their specific affinities... and enables them to be regarded, in many respects, as manipulable, and transferable elements or units, which can be delocalized--moved from place to place, from organism to organism, from disease to disease, from person to person (15). Rose suggests molecularity as a style of thought, a new intelligibility and transparency about the compositional makeup of bodies. Molecularization became not just a style of thought, but also a technique of optimization and enhancement (15), a technique which refuted the reductionism and oversimplifying of dynamic biological systems. Together, these theoretical explorations of the molecule suggest its power lays in its unprecedented specificity , one that has peaked the interests of scholars from biopolitics to aesthetics. Molecules are data, but they also are complex arrangements with behaviors, shapes, and forms. What occurs when we take on a "molecular" gaze is an even-ing of playing fields in a sense. Scientific advances in molecular technologies have produced a molecular imaginary that involves new modes of perceiving between things. As a kinesthetic paradigm, molecular modes of perceiving or sensing which emerge from modern molecular biology have altered the framework for a certain vitalist aesthetic. Research within systems and synthetic biology signal a new future of vital states, constantly being regulated, reorganized, and most importantly, customized for consumption. This aesthetic is both uncertain and non-human, an exploration of how agency manifests at a wide variety of scales and between a wide variety of objects. The texts examined in the dissertation belong to no exclusive pre-established literary moment though most are taken from Anglo-American culture in the modernist moment into the 21st century. They are gathered to consider how molecularity produces different disciplinary domains, particularly since New Materialist critique has increasingly called upon scholarship to provide a more associative landscape for not just analyzing material bodies, but also mobilizing them. What, then, does cancer, J.G. Ballard's psychotropic houses, xray crystallography, the electric chair, transgenic mice, poetry about reproductive technologies, Leopold Bloom's dromomania, Bertha's bliss, protocell technology, and systems architecture have to do with each other? The intervention of the dissertation is not so much the theoretical framework by itself, but that the theoretical framework demands a reorganization of how we mobilize a range of cultural artifacts through a transversal mode of molecular thinking. As either agents, texts, or states of matter, these eco-materialist texts that all problematize the natural/culture divide as well as challenge our notions of species, subjectivity, and body-making. Moreover, they tread on the affective space of an uncertain vitalism. It is not as if now we live in the molecular age, as in, we are living in a new age where everything is customizable, transparent, ready to be turned into scientific data and quantified. It is this for sure, but this is nothing new, in fact, we are arguably at the "peak" of the molecular age and biopolitics in contemporary discourse. Instead, the provocation of the molecular age lies in that it marks the age of the indiscernible subject, the indiscernible organism, the indiscernible feeling, the indiscernible machine, the uncertain vitality lingering off the shoots of a downed wire during Hurricane Sandy, the poem-turned-karyotype of an unborn baby, the DNA-less oil that sheds skin for landscaping properties in systems architecture. These are uncertain vitalities. They experiment with matter that differentiates, morphs, and perhaps has sentience, homeostasis, movement, behavior, etc. What's more, and this is a discussion largely missing from new materialist criticism on scientific matter, they have aesthetic histories. From William Morris' treatises on the organic ornamental to Democritus' theories on atomism, the dissertation offers arguments to motivate further research on aesthetic histories of new vitalities highlighted by scientific discoveries. The organizing questions for the dissertation ask how does molecular thinking activate perceptions of vital matter, how are then those perceptions realized in molecular aesthetics, and lastly, what do these molecular aesthetics tell us about key questions of agency that haunt vitalist debates?
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 75/03(E), Sep 2014. Proquest Document ID: 1468678377.
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