School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemSimCity: text, space, culture( 2015)Critiques in the humanities and social sciences of the SimCity games have often stressed the restrictive and mystifying aspects of its underlying ideology. From this point of view, the ways in which these games work to encourage certain player-behaviours and discourage others serves to reinforce certain hegemonic values in urban management and planning. Other writers have contended that players possessed far greater levels of agency in challenging these ideas. This contention in critiques of SimCity is but one expression of a much wider problem in game studies. This problem is, how do we reconcile the multitude of play experiences implied by instances of player agency, with the restrictiveness implied by game structure? This thesis will strive to answer this question using the philosophical terminology of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus' (2003, trans. Massumi).
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ItemBecoming worthy of the event: Left Bank trauma cinema, 1945-1962( 2012)Asking the question, ‘How can we articulate the conditions that make possible the catastrophic event without referring to any form of identity?’ this thesis considers the trauma cinema of three Rive Gauche filmmakers: Georges Franju, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. The argument of the thesis is predicated on taking up and insisting upon the explosive and disorganising power of the traumatic event, made manifest in Le Sang des bêtes (Franju, 1949), Les Yeux sans visage (Franju, 1959), Les Statues meurent aussi (Marker and Resnais, 1953) and Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour (Resnais, 1963). The Lazarean characters that haunt these films bear witness to a radical temporal and ontological ‘ungrounding’; an ‘ungrounding’ that shatters identity and characterises catastrophe. This thesis argues that it is only in commencing with the difference that announces itself in the dissolution of identity and permanence that we can hope to create an adequate theorisation of the traumatic event. The transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze provides the kernel for an in-depth analysis of catastrophe that presents an alternative to ‘deconstructive trauma studies,’ the dominant trauma paradigm within the humanities. The thesis returns to the epoch in which this methodology has its roots, the period between the end of the Second World War and the end of the Algerian War of Independence (1945-1962). It takes leave, however, from deconstructive trauma studies’ attempts to tether the traumatic event to systems of identity. Working within a Deleuzian paradigm, the thesis examines transcendental structure alongside empirical manifestation: virtual ‘becomings’ alongside actual history. Deleuze’s concepts of ‘difference-in-itself,’ ‘repetition-for-itself’ and ‘the event’ are drawn upon and extended into the field of trauma studies. The conditions of true genesis for the actual traumatic event, it is argued, are to be discovered not in identity, but in the incorporeal events and self-differentiating differences that emerge from the transcendental field of the virtual. During the event of catastrophe, these imperceptible forces inscribe themselves - via intensity or pure difference - in the flesh. The traumatic event illuminates in calamity the eruption of Deleuze’s ultimate form of repetition, which repeats only a force of pure difference. Through an intersection of Rive Gauche trauma cinema and Deleuzian philosophy, this thesis seeks to consider the differential changes that ground catastrophe, thus deepening our comprehension of the traumatic event and ethical responses to such occurrences.
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ItemI am, myself, sovereign: the attraction of simulacra in Bataille's sovereignty( 2011)The importance of Bataille’s sovereignty to the future of philosophy should not be underestimated. While the term is obscure and its advocate only partially revived, the sovereign holds the potential for activism and creativity beyond the grey miasma of contemporary existence. In this thesis, I offer the beginnings of an exploration of this position and suggest a number of ways in which it can be useful to a discussion of film and interactive new media art. Georges Bataille’s sovereignty, as he most clearly described it in the third volume of The Accursed Share (1976) is a state of sensual experience outside the mediatory consideration of time. It is produced by physically disruptive and immersive events that undermine the seeming clarity of linguistic interaction. The confusion of Bataille’s sovereignty lies in his adoring frustration with Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal return, and the tense paradox which exists between sovereign thought and physical communication. My use of Bataille’s sovereignty is largely tempered by the philosophical framework of Gilles Deleuze, making particular reference to the simulacrum as it appears in The Logic of Sense (1969). While I am aware of the ironies of using Deleuze for his structure, the meticulousness of his work perfectly counterbalances the poetically suggestive and unfinished attitude carried by the bulk of Georges Bataille’s writing. I will demonstrate that sovereignty is produced by an experience akin to a physical encounter with Gilles Deleuze’s simulacrum. The first chapter of this thesis explores the production of personal and punk sovereignty with reference to the film Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten (Julien Temple, 2007) which loosely chronicles the life of The Clash’s deceased frontman, Joe Strummer. In the second chapter, the simulacrum is implicated in the production of sovereign experience, as it occurs in participation with two new media artworks, Play with Me (Van Sowerwine, 2002) and Shadow Monsters (Philip Worthington, 2005). The third chapter addresses sovereignty as it contributes to an alienation from social bondage in the film Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995).