This thesis investigates the emergence of urban phenomena through a rhythmic articulation of dynamic forms in neighbourhoods of the periphery of Rome. It explores how we can engage with the dynamic of intertwined urban forms, despite only seeing them in particular perspectives. The argument is based on a radical reformulation of our thought on visuality, de-centring perception from the human subject into the phenomenal field, following the phenomenology of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. As a ‘thing’ among ‘things’ we participate in the emergence of urban phenomena, and this participation cannot be reduced to a binary, positive or reciprocal relation of seeing and being seen, but includes invisibility. Drawing on the rhythmic theories of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, these participations repeat themselves on different levels of an eccentric path and in such a way trace themselves. This opens up a ‘thing’-Umwelt relation (in an Uexküllian sense) that shapes dynamic form, not as another whole in which the ‘thing’ would be alienated but as an articulation of variations. Starting off with a discussion on urban “collective-form” referring to the architect Fumihiko Maki, an aesthetic investigation on neighbourhoods in the periphery of Rome provides possible approaches to what I have named collective rhythmic grouping in urban research. The thesis is an experiment that challenges the limits of reflective thought on urban dynamic forms through an aesthetic reflection that refers to philosophical aspects but is essentially grounded in my own practice as urban researcher. The rhythmic approach aims to contribute to engaging with urban phenomena as ‘built’ collectively of all ‘things’, while this very participation reclaims an Umwelt of human ethical responsibility.

This practice-based PhD explores walking and listening – both literally and conceptually – as modes of what I name “Artistic Research as Pedagogy”. The thesis explores the cultural frame in which practice takes place, asking critical questions about urban and spatial belonging, redevelopment, formal and informal networks and community formation. Based on two major projects that I devised and continue to facilitate in collaboration with local communities, and following their genesis and long-term development through photography, video, audio and publications, I argue that the concrete and conceptual dimensions of the works coexist simultaneously; in each instance, these are therefore introduced as different registers of the same work. As such, the distinctions between theory and practice are rendered productively ambiguous. It is within this affirmative ambivalence that the original contribution to knowledge is located. The research is conducted within the framework of Cultural Studies rather than Art or Art History. Instead of merely documenting the practical work, this thesis positions the projects, their evolution, form and framing within a wider critical domain. By doing so, the thesis challenges the roles and forms of art, the artist and the institutionalization of artistic, and academic research and pedagogy. The research derives from two projects: Radio Sonar (2012–ongoing) invites young people and adults to take part in a series of radio interventions that unfold in the context of schools, art galleries, local neighbourhoods and academia both in the UK and Jamaica. The notion of radio “narrowcasts” as an overarching methodology of listening and collaborating allows for a particular understanding of radio as a social construction of power. Here I foreground the concept of “concrete listening”, which is concerned with solidarity, mutual support and action, and which allows for reflection on the possibilities of structural change that emerge through the actions of the project. For a Walk With ... (2013–ongoing) invites elderly people experiencing dementia to take a walk. Based in two residential care homes in London, the project explores the efficacy and the ambiguity of art and provokes an examination of the politics of redevelopment and the conditions of residential care and care work. Walking is addressed as a non-representative activity that is carried out amidst a diversity of institutional agencies. Relating memory (and its loss) to redevelopment, I argue that the prevailing understanding of redevelopment as urban amnesia is obsolete; instead, I propose that thinking the city through dementia is more useful in practice, since the latter affects increasingly more people and demands novel and collective responses. The thesis derives from personal and practical artistic interventions and draws on transdisciplinary theoretical strands, which are prioritised over a survey of art history, art theory, and comparative contemporary art practices. Accordingly, the figure of the artist is one who addresses the problematics that arise through the development of the works, taking art practice as a legitimate site of critical enquiry.

This thesis researches the transformation of labour in digital capitalism. Specifically, it is interested in sites where digital technology brings forth labour relations characterised by rationalisation, standardisation, and decomposition, as well as the precise surveillance and measurement of labour. The notion of the digital factory is put forward to conceptualise this tendency of labour and to argue that digital capitalism is not characterised by the end of the factory, but by its explosion, multiplication, and spatial reconfiguration. The empirical investigation is based on four case studies on the transformation of labour under digital conditions: labour in logistics, in video games, on digital crowdwork platforms, and in social media. By analysing the changing labour process, the changing forms of social division and cooperation, as well as the infrastructural and spatial reconfiguration induced by the increasing pervasion of digital technology, the thesis strives to analyse and theorise a specific tendency of labour in the contemporary. By focusing on this tendency of labour, the thesis contributes to the broad field of critical analysis and theorisation of the transformation of labour under digital conditions. While many approaches tend to foreground the creative, communicative, or artistic features of (dig¬ital) labour in the contemporary moment, the notion of the digital factory highlights diver¬gent effects and sectors in order to contribute to a multifaceted empirical and theoretical understanding of labour in digital capitalism.

This thesis investigates Break Down by Michael Landy (2001), in which the artist’s 7227 belongings were systematically catalogued, dismantled and granulated. Break Down, it is argued, opens up alternative modes of engaging with materiality and mediality; this thesis explores an array of related concerns arising from the work. Landy’s process of fragmentation elicits an inquiry into concepts of part and whole, single and multiple. The granulated material produced during Break Down provokes an account, via Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of affect, of the fragment as narrative matter. Further, Break Down is considered in terms of its operations between the textual and the material. With reference to Friedrich Kittler’s account of media as distributed and multilateral entities, this text explores the conventions pertaining to two textual forms deployed by Landy in relation to Break Down; the instruction manual and the inventory. Finally, Landy’s father’s sheepskin coat, the final object to be shredded during Break Down, is the fulcrum for an appraisal of the thing as an extension of personhood, and of human subjectivity as in some sense ‘thingly’. In this text, Break Down is constructed as an assemblage that operates at the intersection of a complex, mobile massing of currents and specificities; a framing that informs both the structure and the methodology of this thesis. Written, photographic and audio-visual source material is deployed here alongside close analysis of two important texts published by Landy in 2001 as accompaniments to Break Down itself: Michael Landy / Break Down, and Break Down Inventory. In addition, drawing upon Jane Rendell’s strategy of ‘site writing,’ passages of close observational writing are used intermittently throughout this text to relay what might in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms be called the becoming of the texts and subjects under discussion.

In this thesis I propose to address trans as nonnormative ethical formation. In the current definition (Stryker, 2008) trans is defined as a movement outside of constraints that encapsulate normative genders. Preciado (2012) argues that trans involves the constitution of a soma-political project, beyond identity. As opposed to theories that describe identity formation as aspirational, the thesis extends Aristotle’s arguments for ethical formation in terms of interactive engagement within environments through an agents’ dunamis – the powers of its Soul (Lee 1992). The limits of the Aristotelian model will be overcome by use of Anzaldúa (1987) and Lugones (2003). The navigation away from imposed normative environments through agential action will be shown to lead to nonnormative logos: a formational logic shaping perception, action, and practical reflection culminating in practical truth. This reading enables centering somatechnical processes (Sullivan 2009) as generative of forms of life. Wittgenstein suggests that agential logic informs forms of life, shaping validity of both principles and decisions. I use this insight to claim that the polis is ordered by a single logic that informs norms. I propose nonnormative ethics to encompass agents with differing logos. Reading eudaimonia as the demon standing behind the agent, I will suggest that nonnormative ethics takes place outside of the polis on the ‘demonic grounds’ (McKittrick 2015, Wynter 1990). Nonnormative ethical connections are multilogical and are bridged by collective codes. I will draw from Glissant (2002) to make a case for acknowledging agential opacity away from a pathologising claim to interiority. I will argue for nonantagonistic playfulness and loss (Lugones, 2003) as keys to the emergence of nonnormative codes enabling shared forms of life. I propose that the distinction with the codes of the polis is the willingness to share loss, instead of exploitation. The thesis makes the case that bodily change is central to changing one’s understanding of, and relation to one’s surroundings. Furthermore, I argue such change is a collective process, and that emerging epistemologies are connected to contextual ethics.

The dotoc is a religious devotion to the Holy Cross in Bicol, Philippines. Women cantors take the role of pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land to visit the Holy Cross or performers reenact as komedya St. Helene’s search and finding of the cross. The practice was introduced by the Spanish colonizers, but I argue that the dotoc appropriates the colonial project of conversion, translating it into strategies of survival, individual agency, communal renewal, and the construction of identity, through the performance of pilgrimage. I grapple with issues of ethnographic authority and representation. The project is a journey back to childhood and to a place called home, to sights, sounds, smells, tastes recollected in the many stories of informants, or experienced on recent visits as a participant in the performances, but it is also already a journey of a stranger. I am an insider studying my own culture from the outside. Using a Badiourian framework combined with de Certeau’s practice of everyday life and Conquergood’s methodology, the thesis explores how fidelity to the enduring event of the dotoc becomes an ethnographic co-performance with active subjects. Theirs is a vernacular belief and practice that cuts off the seeming infinity of the colonial experience in the imagination of the present. The centrality of the actors and their performance is a practice of freedom, but also of hope. The performances are always done for present quotidian ends, offered in an act of faith within a reciprocal economy of exchange. Chapter 1 poses the major questions and my initial answers and thus provides an overview of the journey ahead. Chapter 2 locates the dotoc in the field of cultural performance, problematizes my ‘gaze’ as traveller, as insider-researcher, as ‘indigenous ethnographer’, and sets down my own path of ethnographic coperformance inspired by Dwight Conquergood. Chapter 3 gets down to the details of the ethnography. Chapter 4 is a probing of the postcolonial predicament, which ends with Badiou and a decision to keep to the politics of the situation. Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 take up the dotoc as a practice of fidelity that is integrally woven into the performers’ everyday life and informed by autochthonous concepts of power, gender, and exchange.

This thesis attempts to re-engage the practice of Sonic Fiction devised by Kodwo Eshun, within the historical context that Mark Fisher termed, boring dystopia, and produce A Sonic Fiction of Boring Dystopia. This also shows how the practice of sonic fiction might intercede to overcome an impasse between a traditional critical theory (Adorno) and Deleuzian approaches to the analysis of popular music. The thesis is in two parts; the first provides an overview of the concept of boring dystopia and the practice of sonic fiction. The second is A Sonic Fiction of Boring Dystopia, that performs an experimental exploration of the practice sonic fiction set across five concepts; Attention, Complicity, Catharsis, Home and Conjunction, three chapters that reconceptualize the works of David Foster Wallace, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, and Theodor Adorno as theory-fictions and sonic fictions, and 6 experiential fictionalized accounts of musical experience. This is followed by the conclusion of the thesis. By developing these tools it is argued that we can chart a ‘line of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2013b: 13) to overcome the impasse that inhibits our thinking about the emancipatory potential of popular music. To help us move beyond the rigid pessimism of critical theory and the sometimes apolitical optimism of the Deleuzian approach. Thus allowing us to discover new territory, which the present paradigm may also afford.

The subject of this thesis is AIDS writing, broadly defined as British and American novels that are concerned with the medical conditions known as HIV and AIDS. These novels are mostly, although not exclusively, by and aimed at, gay men. My aim is to legitimise AIDS literature as an area of literary study through the use of genre theory. The writers and readers of AIDS writing have tended to come from marginalised groups and this has led, in part, to the critical silence that surrounds these texts. My aim is to challenge this neglect of a substantial body of writing and to present AIDS writing as a subject for serious literary consideration. The thesis begins with an examination of the meaning of literary legitimacy and the ways in which previously marginalised texts have achieved literary status. I argue that being considered a literary genre is one way in which a group of texts can be seen to be worthy of literary study. The first chapter explores theories of genre to arrive at a useful working definition for this study. The second chapter examines the concept of AIDS writing as a genre and explores the main aspects of that genre. The third chapter moves on to discuss issues of authorship and legitimacy that have characterised the few previous studies of AIDS writing. The main conclusion is that the connections between these texts, including subject matter and imagery, substantiate the consideration of AIDS writing as a literary genre. The establishment of AIDS writing as a genre is a means of legitimising it as an area for literary study and thus allowing that writing to gain literary status. As a consequence, the subject area of literary studies is broadened, and AIDS writing, and implicitly the ideologies contained within it, is afforded the importance conferred by having literary status.

This thesis offers a new cultural history of State sponsored cultural production in London under the Labour led Greater London Council during the 1980s, bringing the GLC’s cultural policy interventions to the attention of historians of art and culture. The Greater London Council’s Arts and Recreation Committee, and in particular its new ‘Community Arts’ and ‘Ethnic Arts’ Sub-Committees, sought to challenge the Arts Council’s dominant model of cultural sponsorship which aimed to broaden public access to ‘the arts’. The GLC attempted instead to foster a participative ‘cultural democracy’ in London, often centred upon particular political themes and identities. Alongside existing accounts which focus exclusively upon the GLC’s cultural policy discourse, this new cultural history attends to the other side of the sponsorship equation, namely, what cultural forms were prioritised by the various committees, how such policies were perceived by the recipient cultural producers, what cultural texts were produced as a result of GLC sponsorship and how these cultural forms were received more broadly. It explores how the GLC impacted upon cultural production in London, looking to the interrelationship between particular GLC sponsored cultural outputs, whether artworks, murals, posters or films, and wider political and social themes pertinent to that historical moment. In particular, this thesis interrogates cultural forms funded under the auspices of two city-wide campaigns, ‘GLC Peace Year’ (1983) and ‘London Against Racism’ (1984), in order to consider the relationship between GLC cultural sponsorship, cultural production, new social movement activism and democratic participation. Cultural forms of nuclear criticism were funded during ‘Peace Year’ to raise awareness about the GLC’s Nuclear-Free Zone, contradicting central government’s nuclear stance in 1983. These included artist-commissioned poster campaigns and banners, peace murals, pop concerts, community theatre, photography exhibitions and documentary films, including some related to peace activism by women. This case study traces Peace Year’s cultural output to consider the effects of this appeal to London’s nuclear anxieties. The second case study offers a re-reading of the GLC’s new ‘Ethnic Arts’ Sub-Committee’ and its attempts to instigate an anti-racist cultural policy, as part of a broader campaign that sought to address the issue of discrimination in London and across all areas of Council work. It begins by recording a number of the GLC’s initiatives in this area, including its sponsorship of various forms of black cultural production and in particular, the controversial ‘Anti-Racist Mural Project’. Through an examination of contemporaneous and subsequent critical accounts of the GLC’s experiments alongside Council minutes and papers, this account adds nuance to existing narratives by identifying the climate of coexisting and competing discourses at the GLC relating to the state sponsorship of culture and diversity. Ultimately, ‘Beyond The ‘Campaign For A Popular Culture’: Community Art, Activism And Cultural Democracy In 1980s London’ presents a history of the practices and policies of the GLC that is pointedly cultural in focus and attempts to open this field of study to researchers interested in visual culture, art history, community art, identity politics, activism and urban history, alongside those with an interest in cultural policy making at a local government level.

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