Anti-Hermes: Examining Deleuze, Communication, and Power in the Twenty-First Century
Abstract
This dissertation conceives of a post-structuralist philosophy of communication as informed by Gilles Deleuze (1925-1990). This philosophy of communication is based upon two things. First, within the primary literature, the problem of power is a consistent thread around which Deleuze organizes his concepts. Two, concurrent with his analysis of power, Deleuze produces a disparate critique of communication itself that develops and matures across the decades of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, in which he moves from ideas of transmission, information, and opinion, respectively, to focus his analysis of the relationship between power and communication. However, while the history of Communication Studies has also evinced an interest in this relationship between power and communication, the field has not taken up Deleuzian philosophy as a viable mode of theoretical inquiry to further address this association. This dissertation seeks to address this gap. To make the Deleuzian perspectives about power and communication translatable in terms that are relevant to Communication Studies, this dissertation engages in a close reading of Deleuze’s “Postscript of the Societies of Control” essay (1992), in which control is described as several things—the opening of confined spaces, the breakdown of social institutions, and the materialization of communication in practices of technology, labour, and economics. However, this dissertation explains, expands upon, and critiques these perspectives on control that Deleuze only sketches in this essay. Additionally, to make the link between Deleuzian post-structuralism and Communication Studies more cogent, the Deleuzian descriptions of control are thematized on the level of movement, which are treated as both concrete and analogical, which situates one’s freedom by modulating the capacity to move altogether. On one hand, control-as-movement is concrete, since messages, smartphones, capital, information, and people are all things in the world that move from one point to another. On the other hand, control-as-movement is analogical, as much as power and communication have been modelled by Communication Studies as being unilinear and unidirectional, from a sender to a receiver. And yet, today, control is multilinear and multidirectional, within which power and communication are omnipresent.
Description
Keywords
Mass Communications
Citation
Pattinson, T. (2017). Anti-Hermes: Examining Deleuze, Communication, and Power in the Twenty-First Century (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/24935