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Ambient Order and Topologies of Air

Sat, September 1, 9:00 to 10:30am, ICC, E5.4

Abstract

Throughout his work, Michel Serres asserts that different periods of history are not defined by transformations between elements but instead, by transformations between different states of the same element. Serres suggests that the dominant state of matter in the contemporary Anthropocene has changed phase from the solids of classical physics, to a fluid flux exemplified in Bergson’s philosophy, to the gaseous transmissions of information technologies. In paper, I want to explore how the current atmosphere (taken both as the ambient medium of air and as the omnipresent mood of the volatile and uncertain political present) makes for the materialization of different states of matter and matters of state, in scholarship and polity alike.

This provocation frames the global, national and local, as well as the social, technical and cultural, as co-evolving topological systems and surfaces capable of behaving spatially—thus as capable of having atmospheres. In this context then, I want to explore how these spaces are changing by the digital matter that passes through them. What sort of spaces unfold at the global and local levels, as our rhetorical situations become rearranged alongside new radiant objects? In other words, how do we, as scholars, attune our senses, or become amphibious in this now chimerized air that is imbued with digitality? To this end, in this paper, I will use intelligence as a thinking object to consider how we can come resolve the global and the local in digitally attuned scholarship.

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