Dissertation
Neckerology: fiction, technology, and theory after postmodernism
University of Iowa
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
Spring 2023
DOI: 10.25820/etd.007000
Abstract
Around the time that academics like Antonio Negri, Nicholas Dames, Jeffrey Nealon, Raoul Eshelman, Stephen Best, and Sharon Marcus had announced the death of postmodernism, internet talking heads such as Jordan Peterson began blaming it for the ills of the twenty-first century. Postmodernism as such seems to be caught Janus-faced, a signifier which as a singular surface marks the intersection between two incongruent points of view.
This dissertation tracks the transformations of postmodernism in the digital era. Grounded in phenomenology and object-oriented ontology, my central concern becomes the pervasive material networks sunk beneath the threshold of perceptual awareness, an implosion of technics producing new and unseen sites of commoditization, surveillance, and posthegemonic power. I trace this lineage through the critical category of “surface,” arguing that numerous contemporary fictions, SF in particular, both engage with, and are themselves the products of, the subsumption of the machine into interface: the apparatus under erasure in the digital age.
My metaphor for this impossible double-one-sidedness is the Necker Cube, that ambiguous line drawing dreamed up by nineteenth-century Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker. Look at the 2D image one way and a 3D figure will emerge—which in a moment will invert itself. This gestalt switch involves no new information and yet appears to produce a new point of view. The cube flickers and flits—it neckers—back-and-forth, and any particular orientation registers only as the difference between the foremost face and its opposite.
Neckerology thus becomes an interpretive protocol for seeking out the liminal thresholds between surfaces. Much like how slips of the tongue were for Freud no mere absentminded mistakes but the signifiers of a hidden discourse, neckerological slips in perception can reveal the gaps or inconsistencies in our being-in-the-world. From humans’ coevolution with technology in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to the conspiracy theories and mutual unseeing of The Crying of Lot 49 and China Miéville’s The City & The City to the viral replication of Bennett Sims’s A Questionable Shape and Dave Eggers’s The Circle, I examine the state—and stakes—of moving ever more of our lives online.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Neckerology: fiction, technology, and theory after postmodernism
- Creators
- Benjamin Kirbach
- Contributors
- Garrett Stewart (Advisor)Loren Glass (Committee Member)Brooks Landon (Committee Member)Stephen Voyce (Committee Member)David Wittenberg (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- English
- Date degree season
- Spring 2023
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- DOI
- 10.25820/etd.007000
- Number of pages
- xxv, 319 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright 2023 Benjamin Kirbach
- Language
- English
- Date submitted
- 04/25/2023
- Date approved
- 05/10/2023
- Description illustrations
- illustrations
- Description bibliographic
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 306-319).
- Public Abstract (ETD)
- The Necker Cube—that ambiguous line drawing dreamed up by nineteenth-century Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker—is what psychologists call 'multistable'. Look at the 2D image one way and a 3D figure will emerge—which in a moment will invert itself. This change involves no new information and yet appears to produce a new point of view. The cube flickers and flits—'it neckers'—back-and-forth, and any particular orientation registers only as the difference between the foremost face and its opposite. My dissertation uses the Necker Cube as a metaphor for seeking out these flickers and flits, whether intentional or unintentional, in cultural objects (as well as perhaps life in general). I call it neckerology, and it means to shift one’s point of view—even if momentarily—to reveal the blind-spots hidden behind. I argue that this way of reading (of thinking, seeing, etc.) is especially poignant now, in the twenty-first century, when so much of our lives have been subsumed by the interface logic of computer networks. What we “see” on the computer screen is an array of brightly-colored visual metaphors—but what these really 'are' is code, ones and zeros, voltages, and electromagnetic radiation that, in baffling and often uncanny ways, stare back at us. That technology evolves here, on the flipside of consciousness, is examined in texts ranging from: '2001: A Space Odyssey' to Dave Eggers’s 2013 dystopian novel 'The Circle.'
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9984424789702771
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