Thesis Chapters by Thomas P Keating
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Recently, geographers and social scientists have done much to develop the conceptual relationship... more Recently, geographers and social scientists have done much to develop the conceptual relationship between technology and affect. Notably, nonrepresentational geographies, as well as social scientists contributing to the so called ‘turn to affect’, have contributed ways to understand how technologies modify thought and action via specific kinds of productive relations acting through and between bodies. Reacting to various kinds of anthropocentric conventions that hold thought and action as the sole quality of a human subject, this research has developed various experimental approaches to examine how technologies modify thought and action in terms of nonhuman potentiality and immanent differentiations of life.
In this thesis I contribute to this research by theorising the relationship between technology and affect ethologically. The point of departure for this task is my contention that social scientific engagements with technology and affect tend to be narrowly and reductively focused on the figure of the human individual. My main argument is to say that thinking the relationship between technology and affect ethologically forces the social sciences to consider those compositional movements that are irreducible to the figures of the ‘individual’ or ‘human’ – offering opportunities for conceptualising and experimenting with more expansive relations between thought, affect and technology.
In developing this argument, the thesis draws upon the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) and Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) – two French philosophers whose shared commitment to theorising processes of individuation makes quite clear the problem with framing thought around the figure of the individual. Following Simondon especially, I foreground a way of conceptualising technology and technics ontogenetically – a manoeuvre that insists on understanding technologies in terms of adaptive and creative process. Conceptualising and experimenting with certain technological processes, I argue that the affective capacity of technologies cannot be reduced to individuated terms – a line of thought that refutes a certain tendency within the social sciences to theorise technological affects in terms of the embodied individual and technical object. I conclude by affirming ethological thinking as adequate for analysing the individuating movements of technological affects.
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Papers by Thomas P Keating
Progress in Human Geography, 2023
Technologies have been theorised to understand their powers to produce spacetimesnotably through ... more Technologies have been theorised to understand their powers to produce spacetimesnotably through Bernard Stiegler's reading of technics as constitutive of human ontology. However, less attention has been paid to how technologies shape spacetimes according to their own distinct logics of evolution, the result being a tendency to reduce technological agency to a question of its effects on human being. The first half of the paper elaborates this problem in conversation with geographies of the digital turn. The second half introduces an alternative approach through Gilbert Simondon's ontogenetic notion of technology characterised by its own logics of evolutionwhat I term techno-genesis.
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Progress in Environmental Geography, 2023
This article assays geographical research into nuclear cultures, and cognate conversations in ato... more This article assays geographical research into nuclear cultures, and cognate conversations in atomic heritage, toxic waste studies, and memory and landscape studies, as one way to develop the notion of nuclear memory. In doing so, we survey how geographers and social scientists have sought to think and communicate memory of nuclear things through three specific modes: the archival, the aesthetic, and the speculative. Our central argument is that nuclear memory provides a theoretical orientation for geographers to engage with alternative possibilities for thinking nuclear waste futures besides anthropocentric notions of common sense.
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Social & Cultural Geography, 2022
This paper develops the notion of the technological unconscious by engaging with the geographic r... more This paper develops the notion of the technological unconscious by engaging with the geographic relationship between technology and the production of subjectivity. Drawing upon research with the Alternate Anatomies Laboratory in Australia, the paper advances this relationship through an empirical encounter with sonographic imaging. Contributing to conceptualisations of the ways technologies participate in unconscious activity, in this paper ultrasound imaging (sonography) is turned to as one way to think about the enunciation of subjectivity that assists the ultrasound technician in homing-in to particular signifying and a-signifying semiotic cues. Rather than siding with broad understandings of the technological unconscious, the paper articulates the production of specific processes of the technological unconscious via machinic enunciation, which reveals ways of rethinking human-technology relationships through infra-sensible semiotic operations.
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Baltic Worlds, 2021
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Speculative Empiricism Nature and the Question of Predatory Abstractions - A Conversation with Didier Debaise, 2021
In conversation 1 with Didier Debaise, this piece thinks transversally across Nature as Event (20... more In conversation 1 with Didier Debaise, this piece thinks transversally across Nature as Event (2017a) and Speculative Empiricism (2017b) to explore some of the key stakes in his philosophy, namely: the relationship between the task of thinking a speculative empiricism and the problem of the bifurcation of nature. Engaging with the themes of nature, abstraction, dualism, pragmatism, and the role of stories in dramatizing our sensitivity to the world, the conversation develops Debaise's contribution to theorising alternative modes of knowledge and experience capable of admitting those infra-sensible, inaudible, or imperceptible qualities of events. Distinctly, Debaise introduces here the problem of 'predatory abstractions' as one way to understand the problem of bifurcation. Ethically, the question of predatory abstractions makes new demands on the social sciences: to story new abstractions capable of deepening our experience of nature.
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Imaging, 2019
This piece intervenes by developing an understanding of the nonhuman power of images. It does so ... more This piece intervenes by developing an understanding of the nonhuman power of images. It does so by attending to a different style of thought for approaching images and imaging practices: that is, as something composed of and open to a much wider 'ecology of experience' (Manning and Massumi, 2014). Engaging with a recent geographical concern with the affective power of images, it argues for the need to affirm in imaging a specific intensive power to defamiliarize human-centred frames of thought used to think about the active powers of images.
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cultural geographies, 2019
This article develops the theoretical relationship between affect and the pre-individual. It does... more This article develops the theoretical relationship between affect and the pre-individual. It does so to respond to a recent tendency to posit affect as vague form of relationality exceeding the individual.
Instead, the article outlines how affect, as a concept that draws upon a certain Deleuze–Spinozian line of thought, is at least as much a process corresponding to virtuality and potentiality as it is one that pertains to embodied individuals. Instructing this move is the writing of Gilbert Simondon, a philosopher who conceptualises affect in terms of pre-individual potentials exceeding the individual.
Engaging with Simondon’s conceptualisation of individuation and perception as a way to trace the importance of these pre-individual processes, affect is understood more precisely as a potentialised
orientation of non-individuated relationality. More significantly, though, the article argues that Simondon’s notion of the pre-individual can be used to develop an ontogenetic logic of affect, through which thought is directed towards processes of individuation exceeding the individual but that, nevertheless, modify the genesis of affection, perception and action – an argument I make tangible through a brief discussion of John Hull’s writing on sense and perceptual experience. An ontogenetic logic of affect, I suggest, demands that the thought schemas through which social scientists evaluate processes of affect be open to these pre-individual potentials that orientate perceptive experience.
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Book Reviews by Thomas P Keating
Furtherfield, 2018
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Books by Thomas P Keating
Speculative Geographies: Ethics, Technologies, Aesthetics , 2022
We are bringing this collection together at a time in which speculative ways of thinking appear t... more We are bringing this collection together at a time in which speculative ways of thinking appear to be undergoing a reprise across the social sciences and humanities. Whether through engagements with speculative cosmology (Stengers, 2006), speculative empiricism (Debaise, 2017), speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2011), speculative research (Wilkie et al., 2017), or speculative realism (Bryant et al., 2011), what is striking about this moment is that 'speculation' is approached as a diverse set of conceptual and empirical endeavours that construct plural rather than singular narratives, recuperate multiple rather than complete forms of knowledge, value holding open what is at stake and can be brought into
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Speculative Geographies: Ethics, Technologies, Aesthetics , 2022
Nuclear remains concern the materiality of spent radioactive substances and, at the very same tim... more Nuclear remains concern the materiality of spent radioactive substances and, at the very same time, a question of the abstractions used to think about nuclear materials into the future. As a question of matter, the existence of long-lived radioactive uranium and plutonium deposits means contemplating forms of materiality that often remain harmful to organic life for at least 100,000 years. Countries such as Sweden, Finland, the UK, the USA, and France are now beginning the process of developing so-called permanent underground storage facilities for long-lived nuclear waste, raising the question of how to communicate memory of these storage sites into the distant future. Fields as diverse as nuclear semiotics, future literacy, decolonial approaches to nuclearity, and environmental semiosis together consider how to communicate nuclear waste sites in ways that are no longer founded on human onto-epistemological frames. As long-lived nuclear waste increases in volume into the twenty-first century, nuclear remains emerge today as a problem of how to develop alternative abstractions of thought capable of thinking and communicating radioactive matter into futures far exceeding human life. Pushing back against common sense understandings of the future, in this chapter I develop the relationship between nuclear remains and speculative empiricism as an approach to thinking nuclear waste futures more openly in terms of the contingencies of future events. Speculative empiricism is notable for this task because it provides a way to consider the creation of abstractions as central to apprehending the open possibilities of singular future events.
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Thesis Chapters by Thomas P Keating
In this thesis I contribute to this research by theorising the relationship between technology and affect ethologically. The point of departure for this task is my contention that social scientific engagements with technology and affect tend to be narrowly and reductively focused on the figure of the human individual. My main argument is to say that thinking the relationship between technology and affect ethologically forces the social sciences to consider those compositional movements that are irreducible to the figures of the ‘individual’ or ‘human’ – offering opportunities for conceptualising and experimenting with more expansive relations between thought, affect and technology.
In developing this argument, the thesis draws upon the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) and Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) – two French philosophers whose shared commitment to theorising processes of individuation makes quite clear the problem with framing thought around the figure of the individual. Following Simondon especially, I foreground a way of conceptualising technology and technics ontogenetically – a manoeuvre that insists on understanding technologies in terms of adaptive and creative process. Conceptualising and experimenting with certain technological processes, I argue that the affective capacity of technologies cannot be reduced to individuated terms – a line of thought that refutes a certain tendency within the social sciences to theorise technological affects in terms of the embodied individual and technical object. I conclude by affirming ethological thinking as adequate for analysing the individuating movements of technological affects.
Papers by Thomas P Keating
Instead, the article outlines how affect, as a concept that draws upon a certain Deleuze–Spinozian line of thought, is at least as much a process corresponding to virtuality and potentiality as it is one that pertains to embodied individuals. Instructing this move is the writing of Gilbert Simondon, a philosopher who conceptualises affect in terms of pre-individual potentials exceeding the individual.
Engaging with Simondon’s conceptualisation of individuation and perception as a way to trace the importance of these pre-individual processes, affect is understood more precisely as a potentialised
orientation of non-individuated relationality. More significantly, though, the article argues that Simondon’s notion of the pre-individual can be used to develop an ontogenetic logic of affect, through which thought is directed towards processes of individuation exceeding the individual but that, nevertheless, modify the genesis of affection, perception and action – an argument I make tangible through a brief discussion of John Hull’s writing on sense and perceptual experience. An ontogenetic logic of affect, I suggest, demands that the thought schemas through which social scientists evaluate processes of affect be open to these pre-individual potentials that orientate perceptive experience.
Book Reviews by Thomas P Keating
Books by Thomas P Keating
In this thesis I contribute to this research by theorising the relationship between technology and affect ethologically. The point of departure for this task is my contention that social scientific engagements with technology and affect tend to be narrowly and reductively focused on the figure of the human individual. My main argument is to say that thinking the relationship between technology and affect ethologically forces the social sciences to consider those compositional movements that are irreducible to the figures of the ‘individual’ or ‘human’ – offering opportunities for conceptualising and experimenting with more expansive relations between thought, affect and technology.
In developing this argument, the thesis draws upon the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) and Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) – two French philosophers whose shared commitment to theorising processes of individuation makes quite clear the problem with framing thought around the figure of the individual. Following Simondon especially, I foreground a way of conceptualising technology and technics ontogenetically – a manoeuvre that insists on understanding technologies in terms of adaptive and creative process. Conceptualising and experimenting with certain technological processes, I argue that the affective capacity of technologies cannot be reduced to individuated terms – a line of thought that refutes a certain tendency within the social sciences to theorise technological affects in terms of the embodied individual and technical object. I conclude by affirming ethological thinking as adequate for analysing the individuating movements of technological affects.
Instead, the article outlines how affect, as a concept that draws upon a certain Deleuze–Spinozian line of thought, is at least as much a process corresponding to virtuality and potentiality as it is one that pertains to embodied individuals. Instructing this move is the writing of Gilbert Simondon, a philosopher who conceptualises affect in terms of pre-individual potentials exceeding the individual.
Engaging with Simondon’s conceptualisation of individuation and perception as a way to trace the importance of these pre-individual processes, affect is understood more precisely as a potentialised
orientation of non-individuated relationality. More significantly, though, the article argues that Simondon’s notion of the pre-individual can be used to develop an ontogenetic logic of affect, through which thought is directed towards processes of individuation exceeding the individual but that, nevertheless, modify the genesis of affection, perception and action – an argument I make tangible through a brief discussion of John Hull’s writing on sense and perceptual experience. An ontogenetic logic of affect, I suggest, demands that the thought schemas through which social scientists evaluate processes of affect be open to these pre-individual potentials that orientate perceptive experience.