On the technological unconscious: thinking the (a)signifying production of subjects and bodies with sonographic imaging

Techno-genesis: Reconceptualising geography’s technology from ontology to ontogenesis

“…Drawing on Simondon, Massumi (2015) shows how pre-emptive security technologies, such as the Bush-era colour scale terror alert system, are notable not necessarily because of their powers as objects, but because they function seamlessly with other technologies and sign-producing systems to produce affects that far exceed the sum of their individuated parts. The colour scale terror alert system is able to modify the collective experiences of numerous subjects precisely because of its ontogenetic capacity to ‘enter into value-adding synchretic resonance’ (Massumi, 2015: 148) producing a wider (a)signifying capacity to shape how a subject acts in the future (Lazzarato, 2014; Keating, 2022). The technologies of the terror alert system have ontogenetic capacities, or what Massumi terms ‘ontopower’, insofar as they engage in the syncretic production of spacetimes with other technological security apparatus – in this case, the production of subjectivity through affects of fear (“high” terror alert) enacted by media, military preparedness, the moods of airport security staff, and so on (Massumi, 2015: 185).…”

Nuclear memory: Archival, aesthetic, speculative

“…In environmental geography, one promising area for future research into the relationship between deep time and nuclear waste politics includes the field of ecosemiotics (Maran 2020), wherein there is already an understanding of how futures emerge in nonchronological time from a present "nonsymbolic semiotic world in which such a future is nested" (Kohn 2013, 206). Another area, and intersecting research into ecosemiotics, includes how conceptual engagements with asignifying semiotics (Keating 2022b;Williams and Burdon 2022) might present alternative modes of memory communication besides linguistic and subject-centred regimes of meaning-making.…”