Otium

Two parallel investigations entwine to compose a plane of immanence where various concepts are rhizomatically juxtaposed. Theories of consciousness are studied in connection to the forces that surveil the will to life, palpable as well as imperceptible authoritarian powers that enframe and inform human activities. The immaterial affects the material. The fluid forces of digital surveillance today structure a particular set of constraints that densify the bodily and spatial limits of modern individuals. Electronic means of control have structured the parameters of a loose confinement that exceeds a definitive objective phenomenon to infuse everyday activities and become an integral component of our lived experiences. Entangled in this reciprocity between the material and the immaterial, the actual and the virtual, the body and its objective possibilities are subject to study within the accelerated disciplinary models of the digital age. This dissertation maps the new landscape that has emerged, the site where power is articulated on the body in the quest to respond to rhetorical questions of autonomy, selfhood, and democracy. In the search for a substance independent from imposing external enclosures, art and philosophy are studied to propose possible means of escape. Against the incessant structures of control, this project explores the potentials of building a space of delay where one can experience other modes of being, a site to become opaque, incomprehensible, and therefore resist the mechanisms of capture.