PhD Oral Exam - Jessica Ruddock, English

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

In this dissertation I propose a theory of the affect of circulation—the feeling that capital is natural, innate, or simply will continue, despite resistance, as reinforced through its historical and contemporary identification with the circulatory system of the blood. Building on phenomenological affect theories by Sarah Ahmed, Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, and Sianne Ngai and the work of contemporary thinkers on Marx's theory of value, such as David Harvey, Beverley Best, Joshua Clover, Jasper Bernes, and Sourayan Mookerjea, I argue that capital is not in the blood and should find no analogy in the human body, as a historical process with an inherent coloniality that requires continuous expansion, acceleration, and violence.

Engaging with works of contemporary performance, poetry, and protest centered on embodiment, I analyze the figurative relationship between the circulation of capital and the circulation of the blood. Works by artists such as Regina José Galindo and Rebecca Belmore and writers such as Lisa Robertson and Sylvia Legris enact what I term radical anatomies of circulation: antidotes to aesthetic and political stagnation. Following the imperatives of the subject of circulation, this dissertation is inherently transnational and interdisciplinary. Following Katherine McKittrick’s insights on method-making, each chapter performs an in-depth formalist analysis that attunes to creative works not as “data” but as containing their own theoretical structures, and it is these structures that reveal, disrupt, and rupture the myths of capitalist circulation, as bound to and distinct from production, to expand the anticolonial imaginary and the tools of resistance.