PhD | ‘Pleasuring Technics: Perverting the Economies of Technical Production with Vibratory Media’ – Bethany Crawford

PhD | ‘Pleasuring Technics: Perverting the Economies of Technical Production with Vibratory Media’
PhD-candidate: Bethany Crawford
Supervisor(s): Prof. Dr. Misha Kavka and Dr. Toni Pape
Institution: University of Amsterdam (ASCA)

What is pleasure beyond its qualification by capitalist and patriarchal regimes of (re)production? How is pleasure mediated through technology and its cultural recursions?  Pleasure, broadly defined as ‘a feeling of enjoyment or satisfaction’ which motivates actions, has been historically conceived as antithetical to rationality, and thus, suppressed and regulated in the so-called ‘age of reason’. In the contemporary conditions of hetero-capital-colonialism perpetuated by the global institutions of power, such as large tech corporations and neoliberal conservative political administrations, the reclamation of pleasure takes on a political urgency. However, such a political project to reclaim pleasure will have to contend with the complex relations between affective experiences and their technical modes of production which are currently operationalised by the above-mentioned systems of oppression. How might these modes of technical production, and their socio-political convergences, be ruptured and reconstructed through a radical reclamation of pleasure as an influential affective force? Starting from the media theoretical position of technics as the ‘exteriorisation’ of memory and affect, oriented to the work of Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler, this research investigates the potential of pleasure as the primary productive mode of technics that exceeds and perverts the contemporary economic structures of production. Through analysis of selected vibratory media, extending from, and beyond, technical objects that are explicitly related to the stimulation of pleasure within the sex-tech industry, this research analyses modes of vibration as related to both technical production and pleasure by means of motion, reverberation, resonance and circuitry. Working from vibration as a physical action that sensorially privileges aural and tactile perception situates this research within a queer and feminist critical theoretical framework through focus on bodily experience which challenges the ocularcentrism of much contemporary Western critical theory. With the understanding of pleasure as a corporeal and sensory creative response, this thesis methodologically synergises creative practice and theoretical investigation.