This study analyzes the politics of contemporary conspiracy theory discourses in the United States. Departing from the predominant methodological individualism that characterizes many contemporary analyses of conspiracy theory, which take the individual subject as the unit to be explained and governed, this study situates the production and proliferation of conspiracy theory discourses in the context of cybernetics and related transformations in politics that have tended to reduce democratic representativeness and increase forms of economic and political inequality. Cybernetics, which is often defined as the science of command and control, offers a series of concepts that facilitate an understanding of how freedom and control have become aligned in the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries in the United States. I utilize Michel Foucault's governmentality approach to formulate a cybernetic governmentality methodology, which analyzes the governance of subjectivity in and through cybernetic systems of communication. Cybernetics, which seeks to invite the individual subject to realize itself through 'choice' and by way of its imbrication into machinic systems, conceptualizes the subject as a consumer and processor of information. I put forth the notion of the scripted political to analyze a key tension within contemporary U.S. politics, as politics is becoming increasingly uncertain yet also often appears to be strongly controlled by political and economic elites. Conspiracy theory, as a speculative genre of thinking, aims to steer events towards certain political ends. Conspiratorial speculation has become a popular means to connect and reflect on a felt obsolescence or superfluity on the part of the individual subject. To substantiate these arguments, I specifically analyze the discourses of QAnon and Covid-19 conspiracy theories. These discourses express political fantasies that often privilege the idea of a liberal autonomous individual subject. The politics of contemporary conspiracy theory in the United States thus concerns the fact that these conspiratorial discourses seek to perform a form of liberal subjectivity. However, this performance of individual liberal subjectivity is always caught in cybernetic systems of communication, which seek to produce value, harvest data, and maximize the attention of their 'users', thus undermining the potential for any meaningful form of liberal subjectivity. / Doctor of Philosophy / This study analyzes the politics of contemporary conspiracy theory discourses in the United States. Whereas today many scholars approach conspiracy theory as concerning the beliefs of individual subjects, whose thoughts are considered deviant and potentially requiring reform or monitoring, this study engages with conspiracy theory discourses and their conditions of possibility. While many acknowledge that conspiracy theory is a response to a felt loss of control, this notion of control is understood to be only potentially true or valid. Cybernetics, which is often defined as the science of command and control, offers a series of concepts that facilitate an understanding of how freedom and control have become aligned in the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries in the United States. Cybernetics, which seeks to invite the individual subject to realize itself through 'choice' and by way of its imbrication into machinic and technological systems, conceptualizes the individual subject as a consumer and processor of information. I develop a new notion that I call the scripted political to study a key tension within contemporary U.S. politics, as politics is becoming increasingly uncertain yet also often appears to be strongly controlled by political and economic elites. Conspiracy theory is a speculative genre of thinking that is well-suited to produce social and political meaning in a condition of information saturation characteristic of today's social domain. It does so, among other things, by providing explanations about the operations of what many conspiracy theorists consider to be concentrated forms of power and by attempting to steer events towards certain desirable political ends. However, as a way of producing social and political meaning, conspiracy theory often misses the mark. Yet, despite its frequent factual inconsistencies, conspiratorial discourses and speculations have become popular means to create social connections and to reflect on a sense of obsolescence or superfluity felt by many individual subjects. To support these arguments, I focus on the conspiratorial discourses of and about QAnon and about the Covid-19 pandemic. These discourses express political fantasies that often privilege the idea of a liberal autonomous individual subject. However, I show in this study that fantasies about a re-empowered mode of individual liberal subjectivity are often caught in cybernetic systems of communication, which are more interested in producing economic value, harvesting all sorts of data about individual subjects, and maximizing the attention of their 'users', thus undermining the potential for any return to a meaningful form of liberal subjectivity.

The heterogeneous field of posthuman theory allows for an account of community under the convergence of late capitalism and high technology and its spread to a global scale. Spanning bioconservative fears of a potential loss of agency and a human ‘essence’ through advances in technology, ‘transhumanist’ hopes for a biological transformation that would fulfil liberal goals for human development, as well as postmodern, feminist interpretations of the posthuman as instantiating a liberating break with liberal ideology and patriarchal structures, theories of the posthuman offer a productive starting point for exploring the transformations in understandings of human subjectivity and community at the turn of the twenty-first century. Placing the concept of community against a background of past totalitarianism and a possible future of an uncontested globalised neoliberal regime that high technology risks intensifying, the present study enquires into the possibility of a community that would escape the metaphysical logic of mastery subtending both past and present models of community and suggests that problematizing representations of the creation of what a strand in contemporary philosophy terms a non-totalising ‘communauté désoeuvrée’ and implicit proposals not for the revival of community as a teleological ‘oeuvre’, but for its rewriting may be found in works by Maurice G. Dantec, Michel Houellebec, and Antoine Volodine, works which have been labelled posthuman themselves by virtue of their incorporation of posthuman themes or structures that come in the shape of representations and problematisations of high technology and its intersection with late capitalism and narrative structures that mimic or subvert conceptions of subjectivity that can loosely be termed posthuman. These novelists write in a context of an ideological, technological, and commercial constraint that hampers literary and political agency and which is problematized both implicitly and explicitly in the use these writers make of representations of violence and literary strategies such as irony, ambiguity, and hermeticism. These representations and strategies, it will be suggested, could be read as subtle attempts to bypass those constraints and restore the potential of literary production to comment on and even intervene in the creation of community in a posthuman age.

Notre mémoire prend en charge de re-conceptualiser notre nouvel environnement audio-visuel et l’expérience que nous en faisons. À l’ère du numérique et de la dissémination généralisée des images animées, nous circonscrivons une catégorie d’images que nous concevons comme la plus à même d’avoir un impact sur le développement humain. Nous les appelons des images-sons synchrono-photo-temporalisées. Plus spécifiquement, nous cherchons à mettre en lumière leur puissance d’affection et de contrôle en démontrant qu’elles ont une influence certaine sur le processus d’individuation, influence qui est grandement facilitée par l’isotopie structurelle qui existe entre le flux de conscience et leur flux d’écoulement. Par le biais des recherches de Bernard Stiegler, nous remarquons également l’important rôle que jouent l’attention et la mémoire dans le processus d’individuation. L’ensemble de notre réflexion nous fait réaliser à quel point le système d’éducation actuel québécois manque à sa tâche de formation citoyenne en ne dispensant pas un enseignement adéquat des images animées. / This thesis re-conceptualizes our new audio-visual environment and analyses the experience we make of it. In the digital age marked by the dissemination of moving images, we circumscribe a category of images which we see as the most likely to have an impact on human development. We call it synchrono-photo-temporalized images-sounds. Specifically, we seek to highlight their power of affection and control by showing that they have some influence on the process of individuation, an influence which is greatly facilitated by the structural isotopy between the stream of consciousness and the flow of motion images. By examining the research of Bernard Stiegler, we also note the important roles attention and memory play in the process of individuation. This thinking makes us realize how the current education system in Quebec fails in its mission to give a good civic education by not providing an adequate teaching of moving images.

As we speak, analogue film is being phased out of the international film industry. The medium that once reigned in capturing and projecting our world's light and the flow of time, has now been rendered obsolete and replaced by digital media technology. However, analogue film remains, and has come to be increasingly used and investigated in contemporary art. In my essay, I examine how our aesthetic perception of analogue film is changing with this shift to digital film technology. How do we experience analogue film – now that it is both on the verge of disappearing from society and is put in contrast to its digital successor? My investigation is based on the thesis that analogue film is now in a state of change. By analyzing three contemporary artists I attempt to discern how this change is aesthetically articulated, and trace alternative forms of continued existence for analogue film. The British artist Tacita Dean, the Italian artist Rosa Barba and the Swedish artist Alexander Gutke all work with film in their own way, and also in the context of the changed status of analogue film today. Furthermore, I examine the possibility that these artists form an active part of a continuous reshaping of analogue film, which is taking place in the fracture created in this shift to digital media technologies.

As an alternative to existing research which states that the phenomenon of displacement resists theorisation because of its complex nature, this study conducts a Phenomenological examination of the nature of displacement in which the interlinked losses in the key concepts of the consciousness of the displaced, namely Memory, Land and home and Identity, are navigated. It is shown that the current consciousness of society mimics these losses with the effect of displacement being experienced as a state of mind by contemporary society. By comparing selected artworks of artists Rachel Whiteread and Cornelia Parker, it is established that although manifested in diverse ways, contemporary artworks reflect displacement according to a set of broadly defined visual signifiers. The visual documentation of a site of displacement in the North West Province of South Africa and subsequently produced artworks underline these findings and highlight the elusive attributes of loss inherent in the displacement phenomenon. / Art History, Visual Arts & Musicology / M.A. (Visual Arts)

As an alternative to existing research which states that the phenomenon of displacement resists theorisation because of its complex nature, this study conducts a Phenomenological examination of the nature of displacement in which the interlinked losses in the key concepts of the consciousness of the displaced, namely Memory, Land and home and Identity, are navigated. It is shown that the current consciousness of society mimics these losses with the effect of displacement being experienced as a state of mind by contemporary society. By comparing selected artworks of artists Rachel Whiteread and Cornelia Parker, it is established that although manifested in diverse ways, contemporary artworks reflect displacement according to a set of broadly defined visual signifiers. The visual documentation of a site of displacement in the North West Province of South Africa and subsequently produced artworks underline these findings and highlight the elusive attributes of loss inherent in the displacement phenomenon. / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / M.A. (Visual Arts)