Towards Something Else

This thesis is an exploration into something else as it is derived from the ontological basis, experience, eliciting, of a nothing which threatens with each drawing-nearer to explode into a plenum, a continuity, a radical outside. Drawing from both psychoanalysis and affect theory towards the consideration of these terms, something, nothing, and something else, I consider objects of limit experience, or limit objects, such as the “body genre” in pornography, as well as techno music scenes. Chapter One is an investigation of sex: in its capacity for expansivity and generativity; it makes the argument for an alternate politics of consent, away from the affirmative and towards the limit, examining the potentially radical possibilities therein for transforming subjectivity and sociality towards something else. Through a Lacanian notion of feminine sexuality and through Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘body without organs’, chapter 1 proposes a transformative model of self-shattering through the bodies of pornographic actresses in Bryan Gozzling’s pornographic series Hookup Hotshot. In its disorganising, void, open, wet, faceless, repetitive, unnameable, shattering, impersonal, unificatory potential, sex proves to be fertile ground for the cultivation of a something else that would both threaten and transform us.Chapter Two tells the story, hour-by-hour, of a night out at a techno rave in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). It starts with us at 9:30pm the night of and follows us, staying up through the night until the sunrise, and riding home with a feeling of something. The aim of this project is to retain the feeling of lostness that a loud room and a sea of⁠—chemical, organic, energetic⁠—bodies impart. In recounting the various encounters, starts, transfers, that made up the night, it explores the circulation of affect through and around the dance floor. I experience the event as a something which makes a nothing of its attendees, which brings them outside of themselves into something else, the field of rhythms which surrounds them, out of which their bodies are constructed. Working through a Deleuzian framework for affect, I account for the bodily, rhythmic, and interpersonal resonances that make up an affective environment. The collaborative elements of the underground music scene mirror the unity of bodies in synchronous motion. The processes of attunement between dancers and DJs are models for alternate modes of being in relation, social arrangements beyond the limitations of discrete selfhood.Through this exploration of objects at the limit, I find moments of shattering, disorganisation, attunement, transfer, the impersonal, the extra- and inter- subjective. I trace in my objects, psychoanalytically, affectively, the movement from something to nothing, to a knowledge of the outside, to the elusive horizon of experience, to something else

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