Issue 4: Hidden Voices

A Secret of No Import

Daniel Sander

The works assembled trace the complex historical passage from the mechanical to the optical to the virtual, looking at the ways in which humans have projected anthropomorphic behaviours onto machines that have become progressively more human. (Ghosts in the Machine)

This is how the New Museum framed its 2012 exhibition Ghosts in the Machine. One of the works presented by the museum as part of this exhibition was Danish artist Henrik Olesen’s Some Illustrations to the Life of Alan Turing, a series of collages that takes as its subject the British computer scientist. The collages incorporate, primarily through superimposition, photographs of Turing with pictures and diagrams of machines and handwritten and digital typography. However, Olesen’s series neither anthropomorphizes machines nor mechanizes humans, but, through collage, superimposition, and juxtaposition — and like the Turing test itself — flattens the terms through which they might differentiated. One collage resembles René Magritte’s The Son of Man in its placement of an apple over a face, and, like Magritte, what Olesen’s series formalizes is the ontological condition of opacity — the way in which everything we see is more than we can see of it. Instead of searching for hidden knowledge — the ghost in the machine, the human behind the Turing test — the aesthetic dimension emphasizes the way in which identification precedes identity and how, in this, humans and machines might not be so different. This paper takes this cue from Olesen’s collages and proceeds by considering Eve Sedgwick’s The Weather in Proust to explore how the aesthetic dimension queerly fragments and frays the dualisms of closed systems, in the same way Olesen’s collages suggest and open out into a relational and flat ontology.

A human/machine dualism is apparent in the museum’s literature, which I aim to complicate. I work toward such a complication first by charting the various non-dualisms that appear in Sedgwick’s book. The non-dualisms apparent in Sedgwick ultimately make visible the openness of autistic perception, which is inorganic and relational. I then consider inorganicity and relationality as diffracted through actor-network theory to make visible a monadological way of being evident in control society and the computers on which it runs (for which we are indebted to Turing). This is to move from the non-dualisms Sedgwick identifies to similar non-dualisms outside her psychoanalytic and literary frameworks. Finally, in the third section of this paper, an analogy is made between information technology and the aesthetic dimension, which claims that both operate on a capacity for melancholic mimesis. The performative capacity of information technology and the aesthetic dimension — the way in which they act — is to act like another.

Autistic Percepts

I begin close to where Sedgwick ends, but at a place and in a way that subtends much of the project that proceeds under the title of The Weather in Proust. Namely, the first of two basic principles she identifies in her work at large in the piece ‘Thinking through Queer Theory,’ ‘a very thoroughgoing conceptual habit of non-dualism’ (190). In this piece, non-dualism is one of the appeals of Buddhist thought, along with its emphasis on practice over epistemology, practice itself being more non-dualistic than epistemology. I want to align some of the other concepts Sedgwick offers us as non-dualistic alternatives.

In The Weather in Proust, mysticism as an open system ‘is all but defined by its defiance of the closed system of either/or and the zero sum’ (5). Psychoanalytically, aligned with mysticism as an open system is Sedgwick’s discussion of the open ambivalence of the depressive position as conceptualized by Melanie Klein. The depressive position understands ‘that good and bad tend to be inseparable at every level’ (136) and ideally develops, or at least provides respite, from the occultism of the earlier, more closed system of the paranoid/schizoid position with its attendant defenses of projection and splitting ‘its objects and itself into very concretely imagined part-objects that can only be seen as exclusively, magically good or bad’ (25-6). In a further psychoanalytic vein, Sedgwick suggests that Klein’s work is more generally non-dualistic in its approach to the omnipotence of power. Klein’s approach relies less on a Freudian framework in which, via substitution, the individual defensively makes internal repressions based on external prohibitions, and more on an anxious negotiation of affect. This negotiation thereby reshapes ‘the view of repression by framing it as a defense mechanism among others rather than the master key to mental functioning’ (134). Against the exclusivity and closure suggested by prohibition, repression, and projection — in which good or bad are enclosed by part-objects themselves — Sedgwick’s reading of Klein reorients us to an affective surround in which ambivalence and conflict can be entertained amongst whole objects and between inner and outer worlds.

Even more generally, drawing not only on the work of Klein but also that of Silvan Tomkins, Sedgwick’s attention to the periperformativity of affect itself is another commitment to non-dualism, especially as it appears in the piece ‘Affect Theory and Theory of Mind.’ Theory of Mind (ToM), commonly diametrically opposed to autism, is ‘something one purportedly either has or has not’ (145). However, just as Klein reframes repression as one of many defense mechanisms, an affective and autistic perspective reframes the closed logic of ToM’s Sally-Anne test and opens it to more nuanced understandings of neuro-atypical sensitivity and flexibility. More specifically, Steven Shaviro, in a talk drawing on the work of Erin Manning and her conceptualization of an autistic perspective (the emphasis here being on a perspectival spectrum rather than autism itself), suggests ‘that autistics are inherently non-correlationist; they do not focus their intentionality upon particular chosen objects, but exhibit a more diffuse and wide-bandwidth sort of sentience’ (‘Value Experience’). This is to say that the openness of autistic perception is both in terms of an attention to the nonhuman/inorganic and a pre- objective/subjective ecological field of relations that is subsequently chunked into neuro-typical experience. Mel Chen describes these two aspects of an autistic perception in a relation to a couch that Chen confuses for a girlfriend, through which an intimacy is encountered ‘that does not differentiate, is not dependent on a heartbeat. The couch and I are interabsorbent, interporous, and not only because the couch is made of mammalian skin,’ and ‘it is only in the recovering of my human-directed sociality that the couch really becomes an unacceptable partner’ (203). Autistic perception, then, might have a lot to do with Sedgwick’s discussion of texture, fractals, and middle agency in her chapter ‘Making Things, Practicing Emptiness,’ and so I return there momentarily. Autistic perception extends the openness of the depressive position below the level of relations of coherent objects correlated to humans.

The non-dualisms Sedgwick discusses psychoanalytically, and that can be extended through an autistic perspective, can be further aligned with a specific politics. Socio-historically, in the second of the book’s three sections, Sedgwick hearkens back to a coalitional leftism in order to advocate for an open, expansive, and intersectional queer politics that is both anti-separatist and anti-assimilationist. Such a politics differs and departs from a more pragmatic gay/lesbian politics that posits the signification of the identity of sexual orientation as monolithic and is both separatist and assimilationist. As José Muñoz argues in Cruising Utopia, ‘the point is to stave off a gay and lesbian antiutopianism that is very much tainted with a polemics of the pragmatic rights discourse that in and of itself hamstrings [closes] not only politics but also desire’ (26).¹

Monadic Concepts

So far, then, we see Sedgwick’s conceptual habit of non-dualism in her coupled analysis of Proustian mysticism and Kleinian affect and her commitment to a queer politics. In describing a pragmatic gay/lesbian politics as based more broadly in American identity politics, multiculturalism, and diversity, Sedgwick also employs the terminology of ‘postmodern politics,’ ‘an infinitely additive version of… separatist assimilationism’ (183-4). Whilst we might recognize most broadly in this infinite addition the irresolvably paradoxical and formally impossible structural logic of the onto-theological, I draw attention to Sedgwick’s naming of this politics as postmodern, as I think it resonates with what that theorist of the postmodern Jean Baudrillard calls the passion for the code. By this he names the labour of ideology, or the semiological reduction of the world to its capture in signifiers. Whilst here called postmodern and a code, politics as an infinite encoding of identity might be described equally as well within the residual logic of Foucauldian disciplinary society, which functions on the enclosures of identity and confinement. Gilles Deleuze, in his ‘Postscript on Control Societies,’ differentiates between this semiotic passion for the code and another sort of code, one that, significantly, tends toward the non-dual:

Disciplinary societies have two poles: signatures standing for individuals, and numbers or places in a register standing for their position in a mass. Disciplines see no incompatibility at all between these two aspects, and their power both amasses [assimilates] and individuates [separates], that is, it fashions those over whom it’s exerted into a body of people and molds the individuality of each member of that body.. In control societies, on the other hand, the key thing is no longer a signature or number but a code… We’re no longer dealing with a duality of mass and individual. (179-80)

Deleuze goes on to suggest that ‘control societies function with a third generation of machines, with information technology and computers,’ machines for which Turing is largely theoretically responsible (180). But if we are no longer dealing with a duality of mass and individual, then with what are we dealing and how does it function with the logic of computers? One answer that counters the vertical ontology of identity in disciplinary society is provided by actor-network theory (ANT).

Departing from the two-level standpoint of mass and individual, ANT suggests a one-level (flat, reversible) standpoint of actor and network, whereby an actor is defined by its network and a network is defined by its actors. Here, a network is not a thing but a cartographic concept used to trace the movements of actors, and actors and networks are not individuals and masses respectively, but both (actor-networks) comprise monads. Whilst the monad has been theorized psychoanalytically by Conrnelius Castoriadis as akin to the omnipotence of the infant within the anonymous collective, it, too, might be thought as ‘not a part of the whole, but a point of view on all the other entities taken severally and not as a totality’ (Latour et al. 7). Another way of putting this is that there are as many wholes as there are parts. The reversible mereology (part-whole relation) of actor and network resonates with Sedgwick’s discussions of Proust’s Neoplatonic Plotinian mysticism (which is described as a network), Klein’s internal object, and David Bohm’s implicate order, or holomovement. Holism here, however, does not exist as such but is a provisional semblance derived at, if desired at all, through the palimpsest of multiple and singular points of view (a one-and-a-half level standpoint, or second-order observation) rather than a preexistent One or infinite sea of energy. In the opposite direction, these multiple and singular points of view, or monads, are not to be understood as elemental, atomistic individuals. Rather, ‘since every item listed to define one entity might also be an item in the list defining another agent… association is not what happens after individuals have been defined with few properties, but what characterizes entities in the first place’ (Latour et al. 7).

Melancholic Affects

That such a one-level standpoint is rendered operational by digital media finally brings us back to the subject of Olesen’s collages, Alan Turing, whose Turing test, or imitation game, provides a potentially more non-dualist perspective than the Sally-Anne test. Rather than asking to differentiate between what two individuals know, the Turing test judges whether or not a machine can think based on whether or not a human judge can decipher its performance from that of a person. Like Klein, Turing sidesteps conceptualizations of thinking entities premised on ‘ideas, representations, knowledges (sic), urges, and repressions,’ placing an emphasis on practice over epistemology, or realizing over knowing, the two being irreducible to each other (Sedgwick 126). Sedgwick’s experience with cancer in ‘Reality and Realization’ shares this performative emphasis, as does Turing’s experience of his queerness, which, when realized, proved fatal.

Sedgwick describes this irreducibility of experiential reality to cognition as an opaque ‘gap between knowing something on the one hand, and on the other understanding it as real’ (210). This description suggests a departure from the denial of occultism with which Sedgwick begins. Whilst initially ‘Proust’s mysticism… owes nothing at all to the occult or esoteric,’ between propositional truth and the realization of reality, another, albeit more ordinary, sort of occultism is emergent, a kind of black box between the input of knowledge and the output of reality (4). That Sedgwick describes such a black box as ordinary and opaque, rather than occulted, is a slight but significant shift. Eugene Thacker describes a similar shift in his theological discussion of a luminous void that is ‘neither pure light nor darkness [closed paranoid/schizoid position], but the continuum of the spectrum of lighting or darkening [open depressive position]; it is luminescence, iridescence, and glow’ (93). This is a shift from a specialized knowledge that is categorically secreted to an ordinary knowledge that is spectrally excreted. ‘It is not hidden, simply unknown [yet to be realized],’ a secret of no import (Latour 244). Less from a theological perspective and more from a media-inflected socio-historical and (post-)Marxist-activist perspective, Alexander Galloway has described a similar shift from one sort of occultism to a new sort of obfuscation in terms of two black boxes or two states of the object of the computer laptop, ‘there are two kinds of black boxes. The first is the cypher and the second is the function.With the lid closed the laptop is a black box cypher. With the lid up, a black box function’ (Black Box, Black Bloc). The cypher is further associated with the windowless Leibnizian monad, modernism, and the dialectical decoding of ideological critique. The function, with programming. The difference is also described, in terms of mysticism, as the difference between a rational kernel/mystical shell and mystical kernel/rational shell, or, in Sedgwick’s knowing/realizing schema, the difference between searching for a hidden knowledge and perceiving a present performance (realization). Galloway elaborates upon the emergence of the programming of the latter during the Second World War:

The new sciences of behaviorism, game theory, operations research, and what would soon be called cybernetics put in place a new black-box epistemology in which the decades if not centuries old traditions of critical inquiry, in which objects were unveiled or denaturalized to reveal their inner workings — from Descartes’ treatise on method to both the Kantian and Marxian concepts of critique to the Freudian plumbing of the ego — was replaced by a new approach to knowledge, one that abdicated any requirement for penetration into the object in question, preferring instead to keep the object opaque and to make all judgments based on the object’s observable comportment. In short the behaviorist subject is a black-boxed subject. The node in a cybernetic system is a black-boxed node. The rational actor in a game theory scenario is a black-boxed actor. (Black Box, Black Bloc)

Most broadly, Galloway situates and periodizes his black boxes in a tripartite history of western thought that focuses the black box cypher alternatively on time (before the Second World War, notably in Hegel, Darwin, Marx, Bergson, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Einstein), and on space (after the Second World War, notably in Lefebvre, Jameson, and Debord), and then more recently, that focuses the black box function on ontics (appearance/presence/existence and disappearance/absence/nonexistence, notably in Virilio, Lyotard, and Levinas). Whilst Galloway overemphasizes perhaps a progression of novelty and replacement — the obfuscation of the black box function obsolescing the revelation of the black box cypher — my present inquiry nevertheless shares his focus insofar as such a making opaque of knowledge through its realization is inherent in the Turing test, or imitation game, which asks not if a machine can think (know) but if it can play (realize).

The Turing machine that plays the Turing test is one that might today most readily resemble a computer: a machine that performs like other machines based on programmable instructions. That is, the way the machine plays is through imitation/mimesis/pretense. In an earlier piece co-authored with Adam Frank, Sedgwick makes explicit the connection I am making here between her conceptualization of mystical Proustian affect and what the joint authors call the cybernetic fold, a historical period of knowledge production that evidences the co-emergence of such analytics as Tomkins’ conceptualization of affect and the technological imaginations of systems theory and structuralism. One shared consequence of these historical congruencies, of Tomkins asking early in his work, like Turing, ‘“Could one design a truly humanoid machine?”’ (Sedgwick and Frank 100) is the disruption of ‘the presumption of a consolidated core personality’ (Sedgwick and Frank 99). In Tomkins’ work, this appears as his disentangling of affect from drive, a disentangling that evidences ‘the plain absence not only of homophobia but of any hint of a heterosexist teleology’ (Sedgwick and Frank 99). Present there, too, is an obscurity that insists on the overlap, the layering, of Galloway’s two black boxes. However, rather than two black boxes there are two systems: one affective, analog, animal, infinite, stimulating, and modern; the other cognitive, digital, machinic, binary, responsive, and postmodern. Sedgwick and Frank’s attention to Tomkins works both to point to the productivity of a certain sort of obscurity such that ‘freedom, play, affordance, meaning itself derive from the wealth of mutually nontransparent possibilities for being wrong about an object — and by implication, about oneself’ and to unsettle homologies within these two systems that would align, for example, the animal with the analog and oppose this to the machine and the digital: a homology evident within the museum literature with which I began and one that the authors attribute to an antibioligism within much critical theory (107-8, emphasis mine).

Such an antibiologism suggests the histories from which Galloway’s black boxes emerge. As Fred Moten has worked to suggest, prior to the emergence of the black box function, one of the constituents of the Marxian black box cypher is the becoming object of a person. Marx’s imagination of the speaking commodity is premised on the subjection of the slave’s body.² Moten’s work has since turned to consider a similar reductive subjection operative in the black box function, namely that the notion of a computer was first employed to describe the labour of a person reduced to a thing, the becoming computer of a person.³ (And here we might not only recall Baudrillard’s semiological reduction and think that Moten might be pointing to the materiality that subtends its quasi-causality, but also wonder about the biopolitical reduction that allows for the smooth displacement of something like Sedgwick’s Buddhism from a practical cultural context to its incorporation as a meter of the intensities of white life.) So, as the revelation of the commodity fetish through its imagined speech is premised upon the erasure of the actual speech of commodified/objectified people, so too is the functionality of the computer premised upon the thingification of human labour. This is to say, then, that the spectre of something like the question ‘Could one design a truly humanoid machine?’ is the machinic human. Ultimately, Moten is interested in the productive potentialities opened up by such histories of deprivation such that the value of computing is not to be located in its increasing cognition, efficiency, functionality, or measurability, nor is it in the bounded closure of black boxing that highlights such inputs and/or outputs; rather, it is in the revelation that such operations are reliant upon an insistent incalculability and the prior consent to not be a single being. Sedgwick and Frank make a similar point in equating the productive opacity of Tomkins’ affect theory with the feedback of systems theory as ‘a valorization of error and blindness’ (107).

I locate such consent, then, not in the black-boxed separation of human and machine in the Turing test, but in the performance of relay that the test stages. This has something to do with the emphasis on mimesis in the depressive position and in ANT. That is, the openness of these systems is an openness to act like another. I recall here that ‘for Tomkins, the most notable feature of the depressive, on emerging from childhood, is that he or she has a passion for relations of mimetic communion’ (Sedgwick 140). Working within a Freudian framework of melancholia and paying attention to and pressing on those moments in Freud that might bring his psychoanalysis more in line with Tomkins’ affect and with recourse to Walter Benjamin’s mimetic faculty, Jonathan Flatley describes both how a self imitates a lost object and how such imitation is also the basis for interpersonal emotional ties such that ‘identification comes before identity;’ that is, mimesis is a capacity for relationality (52). If there is a ghost in the machine, then, it is not a consolidated core personality or overarching ego, but the traffic of identifications amongst a self, an internalized lost object, and an external reality.

Theorizing the monad in a time prior to the advent of information technologies, Gabriel Tarde, too, evokes the language of mimesis. Imitation in the form of imitative rays is the term that describes the way ‘monads share attributes modified by each sharing, the result of which is a list made up of the “same” item repeated with difference’ (Latour et al. 15). Bruno Latour makes explicit the connection between Tomkins’ and Freud’s psychic mimesis and Tarde’s sociological mimesis in explaining the latter by saying that ‘we might end up gaining some “intra-psyche” only if we are entering into a relationship with a lot of “extra-psyches”’ (Latour 216). Contemporarily, one way to think about this turn to mimesis/imitation/acting-like is in terms of the way each technological innovation nests (patent abiding or not) its predecessors.

The aesthetic might be up to something similar. But at one remove, acting at, to return to some of Sedgwick’s terminology evoked above, a (middle) distance, fractally. The sense that Sedgwick most engages is that of texture, for texture, like mimesis, suspends the agential subject in a fractional dimensionality. In describing her experience of reading Klein, Sedgwick likens the feeling of a ‘fractal ineffability’ to ‘getting stoned’ (128), a hazy spacing out that we might also recognize in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, another theorist of touch, for whom the aesthetic is comprised contemporarily of an absolutized fragmentation, a fractality ‘of the fraying of the edges of [the fragment’s] trace’ (126). What the aesthetic adds to or draws out from mimesis, then, is this emphasis on (un-)making that we encounter through texture.

In his analysis of the aesthetic of Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011), Shaviro, also with recourse to Benjamin’s mimetic faculty, suggests that the appeal that mimesis shares with art is not only the (inter)play (here, of the analytic session or of the Turing test), but also an awareness of fictionality, ‘we are drawn to the beautiful semblance on account of its very fragility and vulnerability, its ad hoc quality. Its value lies in its being fictive, and therefore having no actual utility’ (‘Melancholia’). Moten pursues this line of thought in terms of a jurisgenerative grammar, which positions the aesthetic in the relation between breaking and making law — rather than abide by preexisting laws based on exclusion, make new laws — as in his example of singing the letters of the alphabet song in a different order.

We can think the melancholically imitative work of the aesthetic in at least two different ways now. First, socio-historically, that is, temporally. As in the mimesis of transference that mimes a past affect in relation to its present embodiment in an analyst, and as in Muñoz’s thinking of queerness in Cruising Utopia ‘as a temporal arrangement in which the past is a field of possibility in which subjects can act in the present in the service of a new futurity,’ these collages carry information independent of the co-occurrence of networks, information from the beyond (16). They nest a dead actor in the present thus revealing the prescience of his vision. More, this point is underscored by the collages’ incorporation of another dead actor that had already elided the human and the machinic, namely a Futurist aesthetic. This aesthetic evidences ambivalently not only the temporal shuttling of mimesis, but also the linkage of computerization and fascism.

Second, if, as above, Turing’s legacy is that ‘everyone pretends [the mimesis of the depressive and the imitation of the Turing test and monads]. And everything is more than we can ever see of it [knowing ≠ realizing],’ then, having done away with a (neo)Platonic transcendental realm of Forms (or the One), we still retain that the aesthetic is, in some sense, simulacral (Bogost). That monads share attributes, though, is not apparent (and I have gestured to this above parenthetically) until a perspective of their overlap is attained. Whilst technological instruments of data mining and mapping are one way of doing this work, the aesthetic might be an equivalent affective and material instrument, as in the way these collages formally literalize overlap. The beauty I experience in looking at them derives from their employment of superimposition, a superimposition that, like autistic perception, resists ‘linear formulations of ordinary exposition’ (Sedgwick 128) and moves ‘beyond the exclusionary zone made up of the perceptual operands of phenomenology’ (Chen 209). The queerness of the aesthetic, then, does not really propose to the good life a counter-narrative as such, so much as it foregoes narrativization in favor of an inorganic and mimetic texturization.

My project here has been to chart some of the ways Eve Sedgwick’s conceptual habit of non-dualism manifests itself in her book The Weather in Proust and then, motivated by my encounter with Henrik Olesen’s Some Illustrations to the Life of Alan Turing, to suggest some parallel non-dualisms outside of literary and psychoanalytic frameworks. I make such parallelisms through the open structures of autistic perception and melancholic affect, the former drawing attention to the inorganic and pre-subjective and the latter drawing attention to the artifice of acting out of time in time. In a shift to the aesthetic dimension abetted by information technologies in the conceptual form of the monad, the experience of these open systems changes from one of separate occulted interiorities to one of interpenetrated opaque or obscured exteriorities that connect without totality. That is, in place of Bohm’s atemporal implicate order, I would locate the atemporal aesthetic dimension. A dimension in which, outside the human and the monotheistic, and through a synthetic, oligoptical, and monadological point of view, that ‘“part of the world lodged within”’ might be glimpsed as a part of the world of another (Sedgwick 47).

Notes

¹ Here and elsewhere my parenthetical language attempts to illustrate the alliances I am making that bolster my argument.

² See Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

³ See Moten, ‘The Touring Machine: Flesh Thought Inside Out,’ (Lecture given at Bard College, New York, 23 August 2012). Available at: http://vimeo.com/50116966.

Works Cited

Bogost, Ian. ‘The Great Pretender: Turing as a Philosopher of Imitation.’ The Atlantic, 16 July 2012. Web.

Chen, Mel. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations: 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Print.

Galloway, Alexander. Black Box, Black Bloc. The New School, 12 April 2010. Lecture.

Ghosts in the Machine. The New Museum, 2012. Web.

Flatley, Jonathan. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Print.

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print.

Latour, Bruno and Pablo Jensen, Tommaso Venturini, Sébastian Grauwin, and Dominique Boullier. ‘The Whole Is Always Smaller Than Its Parts: A Digital Test of Gabriel Tarde’s Monads.’ British Journal of Sociology, 2012. Print.

Muñoz, José. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New  York University Press, 2009. Print.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Sense of the World. Trans. Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Print.

Sedgwick, Eve. The Weather in Proust. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Print.

Sedgwick, Eve and Adam Frank. ‘Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins.’ Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Print.

Shaviro, Steven. ‘Melancholia; or, The Romantic Anti-Sublime.’ Sequence 1.1, 2012.    Web.

---. ‘Value Experience.’ The Pinocchio Theory. The Pinocchio Theory, 30 September 2012. Web.

Thacker, Eugene. After Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Print.

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