I wanna be a protocol: online media and electronic structures of kinship

Sigthorsson, Gauti (2008) I wanna be a protocol: online media and electronic structures of kinship. In: Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA): The anxiety of immanence; modernism and human indistinction, April 24-27, 2008, Long Beach, CA . (Unpublished)

Abstract

Heidegger famously identified Modernity with a technological leveling of being to a single order of a “standing reserve.” In a radically different tone, Gilles Deleuze articulated a single “plane of immanence” within which ontological distinctions between mind and body, God and world, interiority and exteriority become
indiscernible. Taking such philosophical declarations as points of departure, this panel will consider how a collapse of ontological distinction emerged as a thematic
and structural trope in literary and cinematic modernisms. We hope to consider how writers and film-makers of the 20th c. utilize the resources of their media to ask “the
question of being” that troubled their philosophical contemporaries and heirs. In this vein, we will examine how these modernist ontologies of immanence describe the
crisis of a subject saturated and eclipsed by a world which comprises her while also remaining strange or opaque. Papers will ask what is lost with the departure of a
distinctly human sense of “being” and how the historical arrival of an alternative ontological order may be evident in the lived experience of modernity. In this sense,
the relationship to departures and arrivals becomes the modern subject’s suspicion that he is unable to do either vis á vis the world.

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