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Fluency Machines: Semiocapitalism, Disability, and Action
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- Author / Creator
- St Pierre, Joshua
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Neoliberal capitalism has internalized communication within its basic operations and thus enabled the rise of the so-called “information society” and “semiocapitalism.” In this dissertation I argue that the demand for maximal connection and information flow takes an embodied toll on its subjects. Bringing critical disability studies into conversation with contemporary critical theory, I critique technologies of “fluency” that seek to make information flow unchecked across the social and material bodies. Humans are increasingly expected to communicate on the terms of machines and thus become “fluency machines” that signify clearly, efficiently, and without interpretation or dispute. By exposing in the domains of political theory and political economy the underlying conception of a “sovereign speaker” fully in command of their speech, this dissertation both critiques practices of communication invested with capital and seeks to imagine “dysfluency” as a transformative practice of the self that can break with neoliberal modes of subjectivization.
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- Subjects / Keywords
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- Graduation date
- Spring 2019
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
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- License
- Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.