Abstract:
This thesis takes as a given the cataclysmic collapse of the interconnected systems that make
up the Earth’s biomes, as well as the many cultural systems, built by humans over millennia,
which are both of those biomes and inherently reliant upon them. It begins in a specific place,
among people to whom I owe a creative debt, before fanning out to become a meditation on
global forces that are impinging on all places, all communities, all living things. We humans
are collectively staring down the void. Our temporal horizon is compressing. It is getting harder
to imagine a future for ourselves and everything else that lives. During the decade I have been
pursuing this doctoral research, dire prediction has become actuality. We have arrived at the
brink of the fall.
Bernard Stiegler devoted a life of prolific philosophical work to establishing technics as the
key philosophical question of our time, the “unthought” at the centre of our human condition. He
argued that the technical extensions we have contrived to augment our bodies and brains are the
defining feature of our humanity. They harbour both toxic and curative potentials. On this basis
he posited a preliminary question that has informed my own enquiry:
If the time has come for an armistice and with it a new peace treaty which would be a new contract - and not just
a new social contract but a scientific, technical and global contract; if too many ruins are being accumulated in
the name of ‘development’ and economic competition then this raises a preliminary question: what relation to
technics and to technologies would enable us to think the reconstruction of a global future?1
This thesis brings Stiegler’s thinking into contact with a number of other philosophies that,
while sharing his urgent activist intent, are inflected by their own central questions, their own
urgent calls. Among them, Luce Irigaray identifies sexual difference as “the issue in our time
that could be our “salvation” if we thought it through,”2 while Richard Niania devotes himself
steadfastly to the maintenance of a Ngāi Kōhatu worldview that is ancient, continuous and utterly
of the current moment.
Many of the thinkers cited throughout have placed images, objects and, more specifically,
works of art at the centre of their ways of seeing the world. As I have drawn all these strands
together, I have returned repeatedly to the dual promise and threat posed by art objects. Because
I am myself an artist, and because I live and work in the shadow of a toxic global technopatriarchy,
I have rephrased Stiegler’s preliminary question to make it my own:
What is the relation between technics and sexual difference, what under-examined knowledge
lies within and between these two framing concepts, and how would that knowledge enable us to
think, make and make space for the reconstruction of a global future not devoid of life force but
replete with it?
I’m afraid I have not come up with an answer. If only it were so simple.