The Lab for Critical Technics Lecture: "Off the Grid" by Gregory Flaxman

Abstract:

What does it mean today when we speak about "going off the grid"? The genealogy of this phrase discloses the evolution of an explicitly American biopolitics. Where “the grid” formerly referred to cartographic coordinates and utility networks, the deepening consciousness of our digital revolution now forces us to imagine an invisible latticework extending into our most private moments and spaces. The subject of countless popular films, marketing campaigns, and survivalist treatises, going off the grid means disappearing at the moment when this very possibility has come to seem implausible. More to the point, this lecture locates the paradoxical desire to get off the grid, which has been driven by rapidly changing technology, in the longstanding political mythos of American Liberalism. The result, I suggest, is the emergence of a new social forms--a "society of control." 

Bio:

Gregory Flaxman is an associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. He is the author of Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy (University of Minnesota press, 2011) and the editor of The Brain Is the Screen (University of Minnesota press, 2010). his latest book (coauthored with Robert Sinnerbrink and Lisa Trahair) on “cinematic thinking” will be published by Edinburgh University Press. Currently a fellow at the Humanities Research Center (Rice University), he is writing a monograph about biopolitics and american history.