Text page
Livingston - Touch Sensitive, Cybernetic Images and Replicant Bodies in the Post Industrial Age (PhD Thesis 1998)
"Livingston - Touch Sensitive, Cybernetic Images and Replicant Bodies in the Post Industrial Age (PhD Thesis 1998)" uses feedback, automation, or machinic desire to describe modernity as a recursive system rather than a human-centered project.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The key claim is that cybernetic process and capitalist abstraction belong to the same field. Feedback, machinic desire, and recursive automation describe how modernity runs through distributed systems rather than sovereign subjects.
These pages make recursion operational by tying desire, signal, and control to technical process. Cybernetics becomes a vocabulary for understanding how abstraction feeds back through bodies, media, and institutions.
That matters because the archive's account of meltdown depends on feedback rather than simple linear progress. The future arrives here as recursive escalation, not as planned development.
How to read this text
Begin with the page's account of feedback or machinic desire, then move outward to its claims about culture or politics.
Track how automation, recursion, or systems language displaces centered agency. That shift usually reveals why the text sits in this section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 15
In mapping the `integration' of the spectacle as the spectacularising of the spectacle itself such that it is no longer an identifiable or critiquable phenomena, a set of unfamiliar images will emerge. Each image is perceived to have a very different function, in accordance with the industrial, post-industrial and cybernetic stages in capitalism.
Definition · paragraph 38
It is not until image and bodies are treated as actively immersed in the bio-functionality of open system cybernetics that they can be removed from the protective mechanisms which stall their intensive possibilities. In these environments images function as deterritorialised elements - viral, impure and assaulting on the perceptual system of the participant.
Definition · paragraph 15
Each image is perceived to have a very different function, in accordance with the industrial, post-industrial and cybernetic stages in capitalism. The realisation that the media image is not necessarily representative or obliged to a notion of the `real' world has instigated a shift from the perception of the image as an ideological representation to a simulatory, meaningless surface.
Stakes · paragraph 4
ABSTRACT This thesis uses Deleuzian cybernetics to advance upon post-modern accounts of the contemporary image economy. It begins with the hypothesis that the schizophrenic behaviours of late capitalism have induced an irreparable crisis in the inherited `specular economy' (Irigaray).
History · paragraph 2
TOUCH-SENSITIVE: Cybernetic Images and Replicant Bodies in the Post-Industrial Age SUZANNE LIVINGSTON PhD Thesis - Philosophy UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK Philosophy Department December 1998
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.