MA, Kent State University, 2021, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Philosophy

Now more than ever, the encroaching significance of the internet and its capacities calls us to question how we relate to ourselves as subjects — this question is necessarily a historical one. The notion of a 'virtual' dimension to our social world reorients all of our preconceived metaphysical notions on which we ground our understanding of history. The modern, neo-liberal view of history that informs the popular imagination offers a teleological model of continued progress — I argue that this is ultimately a troubling narrative and urges us to rearticulate how we think of history in the digital age. In order to take on this endeavor, chapter one explores Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's dialectics and the “End of History'' primarily through exegetical work. The chapter concludes with an examination of how this model posits a prescriptive teleology that is appropriated by institutions, such as capitalism, to legitimize themselves as the logical progression of history and to justify the violence used to establish their despotism. Chapter two explores Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's own notions of history in response to the Hegelian model, or rather the dominant western, liberal view of history that dialectics has given rise to. They offer a rhizomatic view of history in which independent, but interrelated elements move and converge into a dynamic aggregate of conditions which pose problems or questions that subjects take up and perform. I adopt this view in order to identify the historical condition of the internet as one which challenges us to question what a (techno)virtual world of possibilities means for a subject — Where does my cognition start and my computer end?; What happens to gender in the digital world?; Who can I be in cyberspace? In chapter three, I explore these stated problems through Deleuze and Guattari in tandem with concepts such as the cyborg (Donna Haraway), computational logos as both the limit and extension of reason (Luciana Paris (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Gina Zavota (Advisor); Andreea Smaranda Aldea (Committee Member); Michael Byron (Committee Member); Ryan Hediger (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Artificial Intelligence; Communication; Comparative; Comparative Literature; Gender; Gender Studies; History; Mass Media; Metaphysics; Multimedia Communications; Philosophy; Web Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Dance Studies

This dissertation examines the dance studio and its built environment, exploring the dynamic relationship between dance and space. The focal point is the concept of the dance studio, analyzed through the urban landscapes and the experimental art practices in the city of Zagreb from the 1950s to the 2010s. The study investigates the dance studio through the histories of spatial structures, dance history, and the history of cinema. Shaped by these processes, dance is specifically entangled with spatial structures and is expanded by their horizons, outcomes, and histories. The dance studio here is a hypothesis built in the process—a space that exists at the intersection of context and time, with dance emerging as an archival record embedded in spatial and societal change. The dissertation argues that this very process constitutes the dance studio's structure: a space, practice, and environment made possible—reimagined, shaped, and hypothesized through the lens of dance and its experimental inquiry. The study approaches the dance studio from the vantage point of the long contemporaneity, extending across both modernism and postmodernism while facilitating the juxtaposition and productive friction of these terms. The city of Zagreb is approached as a dynamic multitude, encompassing a range of developments in the socialist and post-socialist periods that influenced, challenged, and shaped art, dance artists, and their spaces between 1949 and 2010.

Committee: Harmony Bench (Committee Chair); Hannah Kosstrin (Committee Member); Philip Armstrong (Committee Member) Subjects: Architecture; Art History; Dance; East European Studies; European History; European Studies; Film Studies; Modern History; Performing Arts; Philosophy; Slavic Studies; Theater Studies

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2018, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture

In his book Difference and Repetition, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze distinguishes between two theories of repetition, one associated with the `Platonic' theory and the other with the `Nietzschean' theory. Repetition in the `Platonic' theory, via the criterion of accuracy, can be identified as a repetition of homogeneity, using pre-established similitude or identity to repeat the Same, while repetition in the `Nietzschean' theory, via the criterion of authenticity, is aligned with the virtual rather than real, producing simulacra or phantasms as a repetition of heterogeneity. It is argued in this dissertation that the distinction that Deleuze forms between modes of repetition has a vital role in his innovative approaches to the Nietzschean's notion of `eternal return' as a differential ontology, offering numerous insights into work on issues of homogeneity and heterogeneity in a design process. Deleuze challenges the assumed capture within a conventional perspective by using German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's conception of the `eternal return.' This dissertation aims to question the conventional praxis of architecture and urban design formalisms through the impulse of `becoming' and `non- representational' thinking of Deleuze. The research attempts to conceptualize the relationship between history and the occurrence of new social contexts and to locate varying forms of active and temporal engagements with the material formations of cultural environments and historical sites. This dissertation explores the possibility of using history as a dynamic, intensive force in an architectural and urban design thinking process as a mean to escape the historicism and representational image functionary towards a re-engineered creative historical/architectural dialogue. The dissertation will conceptually analyze the difference between mimicking historical styles in a decontextualized manner and repeating them with difference using the theory of Difference and Repe (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Adrian Parr Ph.D. M.A. (Committee Chair); Laura Jenkins Ph.D. (Committee Member); Patrick Snadon Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Architecture

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, Arts Administration, Education and Policy

This document has been (for me, writing) and is (for you, reading) a journey. It started with a passing remark in Gilles Deleuze's 1981 book Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. That remark concerned the cliche. The psychic cliches within us all. The greatest accomplishment of the mind is thinking, which according to Deleuze means clawing through and beyond the cliche. But how? I found in my research that higher education art schools (like the higher education English departments in which I had for years taught) claim to teach thinking, sometimes written as “critical thinking,” in addition to all the necessary skills of artmaking. For this dissertation, I set off on a journey to understand what thinking is, finding that Deleuze's study of the dogmatic image of thought and its challenger, the new image of thought—a study he calls noo-ology—to be quite useful in understanding the history of the cliche and originality, and for understanding a problematic within the part of art education that purports to use Deleuzian concepts toward original thinking/artmaking. This document is both about original contributions to any field and is my original contribution to the field. A critique and a proposal.

Committee: JACK RICHARDSON (Advisor); JENNIFER RICHARDSON (Committee Member); SYDNEY WALKER (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism; Art Education; Art History; Education; Education Philosophy; Film Studies; Fine Arts; Literature; Philosophy; Teaching

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2015, Film (Fine Arts)

This thesis articulates the distinct ways in which American cinema in late capitalism figures a plane of immanence in which space governs movement and dominates time. In doing so, my thesis implies a cinematic regime that differs from Gilles Deleuze's two cinematic regimes of the movement-image and time-image. However, this body of work strives to be more than a simple extrapolation off of Deleuze's well-known cinematic periods. Throughout this project I consciously venture away from the Deleuzian philosophy by diving into the distinct modes of production that constitute late capitalism, and delineating the ways in which this contemporary phase of globalization restructures uneven development into sectoral uneven development, a phenomenon that changes the ways in which bodies experience space and time on the plane of immanence. Thus my methodology throughout this thesis evolves and opens up a gap between Deleuze's vitalism and historical materialism. In the final chapter I attempt to close this gap by inserting Henri Lefebvre's spatial trialectic onto the plane of immanence. The contradictions between time and space that Lefebvre exposes with his spatial trialectic are inherent to the spatial plane of immanence of American cinema in late capitalism.

Committee: Louis-Georges Schwartz (Committee Chair); Ofer Eliaz (Committee Member); Marina Peterson (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2015, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

In 1896, early cinema technology made it possible for the first time to view a simulation of entropy's reversal – that is, to watch time run backwards. This technique of temporal inversion, now known as reverse motion, straddles both the aesthetic and the scientific aspects of cinema's identity. Aesthetic, because early filmmakers instantly recognized reverse motion's potential to transform cinema into a space of the fantastic and the spectacular – the cinematic redefinition of reality. Scientific, because reverse motion allowed a greater understanding of thermodynamics and time's arrow through its indexical registration of physical processes within sections of duration – the cinematic revelation of reality. Reverse motion's upending of causality resolutely resists classical narrativity and opens a plethora of possibilities for the cinematic exploration of time and motion. In this project, I explore the use of reverse motion throughout film history, examining the aesthetic and philosophical consequences of introducing time as a plastic material into the arts. By analyzing a range of motion picture media from the full history of cinema, I unlock new insights into the origins of the time-image, the hegemony and limits of narrativity, the nature of comedy, and even reverse motion's capacity to deepen our understanding of history by laying bare the forces of its production and uncovering absences produced by forward time.

Committee: Michael Gillespie PhD (Committee Chair); Charles Buchanan PhD (Committee Member); Ofer Eliaz PhD (Committee Member); Vladimir Marchenkov PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; Film Studies; Motion Pictures

Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Ohio University, 2015, Studio Art

In three movements, this paper analyzes the way in which apparatuses of capture and control govern our lives. In the first movement, environmental injustice is used to illustrate how apparatuses create, maintain, and destroy spaces and bodies, and allow or prevent certain bodies to speak. In the second movement, anecdotal theory is presented as a way in which bodies typically barred from modes of discourse can find a temporary platform from which to speak. In the third movement, the paper dissolves into poetics upon realization of its own containment within the apparatus of academia, and points towards a way in which all apparatuses could be overcome. Includes documentation from the art exhibition: Wastelands, Revolutions, Failures.

Committee: Katarzyna Marciniak Dr. (Advisor) Subjects: Environmental Justice; Linguistics; Philosophy; Political Science

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2012, English/Literature

This thesis sets out to articulate a theory and method for criticism of ethico-politico-aesthetic conjunctions in what has been termed a ‘post-hegemonic' and ‘post-modern' ‘digital age'. It begins by making the case for the use of affect theory by demonstrating the capacity for political agency in affective transductions to, from, and amongst the masses. While many declared the death of rationality and linguistic communication, and from this declaration concluded that the inertia of the masses would eventually lead to an implosion, I argue that politics is alive and well at the level of affective transduction, and thus operative below, between, or alongside linguistic and rational exchanges. I further argue that the need for a rigorous theory and methodology for affect is made more urgent by the catalysis of affective transduction brought about by the rise of the digital. As such, I set out to develop a methodology for criticizing such affective transductions and then to apply this theory and methodology to concrete cases. In particular, I attempt to correct the current trajectory of scholarly appropriation of affect theory by pointing out ontological misconstructions. Having developed an ontologically sound articulation of affect, I set out to apply it to the case of the revolutionary and the capitalist. In the case of the revolutionary, I attempt to provide a rigorous defense of the popular assertion that affective production must always occur externally to capital, and can only then be appropriated afterwards. I show that the necessarily fiscally damaging and unscrupulous aspects of affective engineering defy commodity fetishism, the operative logic of capital, and thus that capital, even if it were capable of engineering affects, would have no interest in doing so. For capital, I trace the way in which affective refrains are continually systematized, rigidified, and deployed by capitalist structures in a normative fashion. In particular, I look at the case of Go (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ellen Berry Dr. (Committee Chair); William Albertini Dr. (Committee Member); Clayton Rosati Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; American Studies; Communication; Ethics; Literature; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Multimedia Communications; Philosophy; Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2006, Interdisciplinary Studies

Since their publication, Deleuze's Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (French 1983, English 1986) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (French 1985, English 1989) have held a precarious position in Anglophone film studies. The difficulties of the cinema books are pointed out by many, a broad range of complaints have been leveled against them, and their usefulness has been widely questioned. There has, however, been an increase in interest in the cinema books among Anglophone film scholars over the last few years. Still, many of the “complaints” and “concerns” about the cinema books remain. A guiding principal of this dissertation is to provide a “way in” to Deleuze's work in the cinema books, or a key to assist in unlocking and unpacking Deleuze's cinema project. To this end, I have analyzed Deleuze's approach in the cinema books, their style, methodology, rationale and theoretical framework, utilizing Theodor Adorno's concept of “parataxis” because I believe it illuminates his metaphysics. I have also explicated key elements of Deleuze's Bergson-inspired metaphysics, concentrating on what I feel are fundamental aspects that aid in a clarification of “movement-images” and “time-images.” A key concept that I utilized in this endeavor is Deleuze's “crystal-image” because I maintain that the characteristics of crystal-images are the very foundation of all time-images. I endeavored to “fill in the gaps” in Deleuze's cinema books by making connections between concepts that may not be apparent, addressing elisions in the cinema books as well as the current body of scholarly work on them. I utilized examples from contemporary films to illustrate Deleuze's concepts, particularly Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001-2003). I demonstrated how certain Deleuze terms can be used in film criticism and provided evidence that Deleuze's work represents an alternative to theoretical models used in film studies, specifically presenting that Deleuze's ideas about time-images can (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Cynthia Baron (Advisor) Subjects: Cinema; Philosophy