Infinite Ontologies of the Chthulustream
Posthumanism and Racial Capital in Contemporary Streaming Media
William Brown, David H. Fleming
Provides a critical analysis of various contemporary and classic shows, as well as of streaming media in general
- Provides case studies of contemporary popular shows such as Stranger Things, The Twilight Zone, Watchmen, Lovecraft Country, Sense8, The OA, Ad Vitam and DEVS, as well as brief interrogations into classic shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents…, the Dekalog and Twin Peaks
- Employs both posthuman and critical race methodologies in order to steer away from the white anthropocentric worldview that is characteristic of traditional western philosophy
- Broadens critical engagement with the emerging conceptual notion of chthulumedia, i.e. media produced in the ‘Chthulucene,’ itself a term designed to decentre the (white) anthropos/human of the Anthropocene
- Introduces the concept of Infinite Ontologies to critically redress notions of Object Orientated Ontology (∞O after OOO)
Brown and Fleming employ the twin discourses of critical race theory and posthumanism in order to expose how multinational platforms like Netflix play a role in both problematising and perpetuating deeply entrenched violences lurking within the intersections of racism, capitalism, and technology. The authors dive into the racialised world-building of shows like Stranger Things, Watchmen, Lovecraft Country, Sense8, The Twilight Zone, The O.A., Ad Vitam and DEVS, and through their groundbreaking media philosophy diagnose and confront the oppressive and racialising nature of streaming media at the end of the world, in the so-called Chthulucene (or ‘Chthulustream’). As Brown and Fleming demonstrate, streaming media can, at their best, liberate thought to confront overlapping infinite ontologies (∞O) that themselves offer a timely panacea and corrective to Object-Oriented-Ontology (OOO).
Introduction: The Mantle of the Beast
Or, Starting in the Middle (Passage)
Superposition I: Ontological Whiteness and/as Antiblackness
1. Ad Vitam
2. Stranger Things
3. The O.A
Superposition II: Paraontological Blackness
4. The Twilight Zone
5. Watchmen
6. Lovecraft Country
Superposition III: Ornamental Others and Foreigners Within
7. DEVS
8. Sense8
Conclusion: I May Destroy You... High Flying Birds
A theoretically sophisticated, highly energetic, cognitopoetic passage through the media ecologies of computational racial capitalism, with serious attention to the B-side of popular culture as here revealed by original and compelling concatenations of key concepts from Marxist, Critical Race and Media Theory. Brown and Fleming mobilize a Hunter S. Thompson meets Sylvia Wynter analytic prose to parse the mycological, cephalopodic, algorithmic formations of meaning and violence — this latter, a Lovecraftian synthesis that, as they demonstrate, has become increasingly unavoidable in a digitized, racialized and colonized world immersed in self-made yet nonetheless cosmic crisis.
