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Drafts by Gabriel Wainio-Théberge

This paper attempts to account for "cuteness" as an evolving aesthetic category not reducible to ... more This paper attempts to account for "cuteness" as an evolving aesthetic category not reducible to its capitalist commercial context or English language connotations, traceable through different configurations of meaning in different languages and historical moments (including its French and Japanese equivalents, predating the English language adoption of "cute") and its ongoing expansion and modification in online artistic and memetic subcultures, where it is quickly becoming a dominant category. In order to articulate a sufficiently expansive meta-concept, I turn to animal studies and vitalism, observing cuteness as a social emotion that operates below the register of identification as human, and the dialectics of life and form that concerned Deleuze in his work on aesthetics and the collapse of representation in modernism. Intervening in the generally problematizing ethical readings of cuteness, I attempt to articulate it as a formal criterion of growing vitality that produces something like the Levinasian Encounter with a not-necessarily-human Other, with the potential for both ethical and unethical or non-ethical uses.

In the tradition of Schmitt and Agamben’s “political theology”, anthropologists David Graeber and... more In the tradition of Schmitt and Agamben’s “political theology”, anthropologists David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins have traced the concept of political power and sovereignty to an initially religious impulse - an attempt to channel the raw violent potential of humans and, as importantly, nature into a ceremonial vehicle. They differentiate between two models of ancient sovereignty - divine kings (whose divine power is absolute and unrestrained) and sacred kings (who embody power in order to contain it). In these terms - insofar as the sovereign is conceptualized as the one who imposes the state of exception, rather than the sacrifice on whom it is imposed - political thought in the Western tradition embedded in the tradition of divine kingship.
Robert Graves, following James Frazer, proposed an alternate lineage of sacred kingship at the earliest origins of the Western tradition in the myth of a dying and resurrecting king, ultimately subordinate to the true source of divine power, the Goddess of life, who is slain and replaced by his double. This sacrificial ritual, unlike current binary models of sovereignty, is mediated by a third term which operationalizes a second binary, splitting that in which the "sovereign" always arises as the dominant term against itself.
Though its historicity has been challenged, I argue that this model taken as a formal hypothetical presents a useful paradigm for demonstrating the contingency of the form of the paradox of sovereignty asserted by Schmitt, Agamben, etc., and reading it in relation to the structure of binary contradiction and dialectic - manifest distinctly in the structure of double kingship and in the opposition of sovereign and homo sacer - as well as the absent term of mediation.

Herbert Marcuse’s most famous phrase, the “One-Dimensional Society”, refers to a society of not o... more Herbert Marcuse’s most famous phrase, the “One-Dimensional Society”, refers to a society of not only social and ideological but cognitive and phenomenological conformity: one in which “the tension between appearance and reality, fact and factor, substance and attribute tend to disappear”. But it is, most specifically, one where all these dimensions of thought - of intelligence - disappear into “technological rationality” which “projects nature as…. stuff of control and organization”. This concept was influenced by the Frankfurt School, notably Adorno and Horkheimer, who define the same concept in more detail as “instrumental reason”. The collapse of thought into this narrow range makes it incapable of investigating, among other things, “the ontological tension between essence and appearance, between “is” and “ought””; according to which reason sets the very goals of this capacity to organize and transform the world. Instead, those prescribed by the coercively unified society are blindly accepted as given, and the power of control exercised without conscious ethical limits, but within strict ideological bounds.
Half a century later, this radical divergence between reason and values has been problematized once more in the theory of artificial intelligence, in much the same terms but with the dimensional metaphor inverted. In what has become known as the “orthogonality thesis”, AI futurist Nick Bostrom proposed that “intelligence and final goals are orthogonal axes along which possible artificial intellects can freely vary” (Bostrom, 1); that is, instrumental reason by itself does not provide for its own ends. There is little overt reference to, or indication that AI theorists are referencing Marcuse; but the similarity of the figure seems relevant to the way what once were philosophical problems about the fate of runaway instrumental rationality are now reframed as technical ones. The possibility of artificial intelligence has forced thinkers from a scientific background to grapple with concepts that were once the domain of critical theory, and thrown critical theorists into crisis. But what can the critical theory of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School tell us about the implications of a technology that technologists themselves believe might literally soon dominate mankind?

To consider the " internet meme " a relevant pop cultural phenomenon is, at this point, to state ... more To consider the " internet meme " a relevant pop cultural phenomenon is, at this point, to state the obvious. To acknowledge and analyze it as a relevant new artform or aesthetic paradigm is to call into question some of the few stable points left in our current model of art – particularly the association of art and originality-and reveal the social structures underpinning them. Much of the mainstream discussion of internet memes has approached them simply as a new, " viral " means of dissemination of existing forms of culture, such as music videos (Gangnam Style) and home videos. " Viral " but recognizable content tends to make up a wide range of the " memes " that reach mainstream cultural spaces, where they can be easily understood. Other popular memes, however, such as rage comics, LOLcats and advice animals, revolve around a more participatory form of distribution and reproduction in which modification is a part of spreading the " meme ". These memes tend to gestate in subcultural internet spaces such as Youtube, Tumblr and 4chan, with their own distinct structures and values, particularly as they relate to originality and identity, as well as, to use the terminology of more public legal debates, " intellectual property ". The social dynamics of pseudonymity and anonymity encourage a collective aesthetic practice of meme creation in which originality and repetition, as well as irony and sincerity, alternate in order to generate the reversals characteristic of joke structure. The " memes " that result are tentatively assigned a higher value than our culture has historically assigned humour – a value that is simultaneously preserved from creative deterioration or mainstream cultural influence by ironic self-deprecation, the devalued status of humour, and the devalued status of repetition, which more than anything else separates distinguishes the value of aesthetic or creative practice on the internet from its value in both commercial and artistic spheres – replacing rarefied and status-informing notions of originality and taste with a community-building exercise and breakdown of hierarchies through free play with the materials and concept of " original content " .