Infinite Ontologies of the Chthulustream - (Screens, Thinking, Worlds) by William Brown & David H Fleming (Hardcover)

About the Book

Provides a critical analysis of various contemporary and classic shows, as well as of streaming media in general.

Book Synopsis

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).

Review Quotes

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.-- "Jonathan Beller, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, English, and Film Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University"