PhD Oral Exam - Joel Mason, Humanities

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

This work centres on a specific functional moment in the creation of collective self-defense: a novel reconceptualization of the endurance (and the negotiations around endurance) of forms that protect the conditions for emergence. Thus this thesis seeks to forward and invent theories and techniques of technological-financial-governmental activation that self-dispossess the ‘source code’ of those very fields, informed by the black radical tradition, process philosophy, and interaction-as-computation category theory.

It seeks this forwarding by articulating a new role for formality in the world through the perversion of the discourse of the philosophy of engineering (one already happening, partially, within itself). This thesis is interested in the hypothesis that (1) there is nothing proprietary in informality’s production of the social economic conditions associated with it, (2) formality may then play a role in such productions, augmenting key functional aspects, such as the option for endurance, and adding to the field its own expressive inventions, not only without hampering or dislodging what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls the poethical, but perhaps revealing how it participates in the poethical, and (3) that an articulation of such a role will reveal new frameworks for organizational design tout court, frames able to ripple through practices and disciplines previously thought to be discrete and siloed.