Thomas Mical
Posthuman Apparatuses with Alien Durations
This theory-research work has been a slow process of burrowing through philosophy of time, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of technology to find a hidden core. As such, this research project is aligned with the Posthuman Time Lab aspirations. This research in progress will form an urgent trans-disciplinary book project with Springer Nature (India). The research began with the initial Time Lab readings in non-holism in technology and temporal delays in art. From here their intersection in time-consciousness becomes a deformable lattice or mesh. This elaboration is extended to a synthetic Posthuman theoretical framework of the delaminated apparatus, dissembled from prior apparatus theory, and drawn across a range of neuro-technologies (highlighted in recent posthuman films). Posthuman technologies assume a reciprocating mechanism of non-linear time. From Apparatus Theory we seek hidden attunement to a posthuman theory of time called Alien Duration. This incorporates Husserlian time-consciousness, the Guattarian machinic unconscious, as well as the Lovecraft cosmology of infinite universes - which inserts madness into representation, exposing traces of emergence in forms of nonlinear time (time loops, and time coiling and uncoiling) as alien. The alien sentience in the unconscious time-consciousness deforms the vitalist modes of duration through a process of recursion – durations being those pools of discrete autonomous mobile-sections or choronotopes, aggregated outside a singular subjectivity like the dream-stacking in Inception or the Influencing-Machine in early Psychoanalysis. The final act is the refinement of the Alien Duration informed by writings on alien subjectivity, abductive logic, and Brassier’s Alien Theory.