Thomas Sutherland
Biographic Data
| ID | 290402 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas Sutherland |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Sutherland |
| SIGNATURE | SUTHERLAND T |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1538-7044 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 51 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Technocritique and its limits: Éric Sadin on human dignity in the face of artificial intelligence
Examining the work of French writer, philosopher, and ‘technocritic’ Éric Sadin, with a particular focus on his fears regarding artificial intelligence systems’ infiltration into numerous facets of human affairs, their imposition of a ‘universal technical principle’ upon all aspects of our lives, and their anthropomorphic and alētheic characteristics, this article argues that whilst Sadin's polemical writings provide a useful corrective to more c…
The Pathos of Finitude
Although it is sometimes construed as a mere negation of philosophical discourse, François Laruelle maintains that there is a positive side to his project of “nonphilosophy.” Often this takes the form of a defense of the “ordinary man,” a faceless individual, without qualities, defined by absolute finitude. Laruelle claims to articulate a rigorous science of man, capable of thinking human individuals in their essence, outside the philosophical in…
(Re)search results: Search Engines and the Logic of Efficiency in Scholarship
This article uses the search engine as a heuristic for reflecting upon the extent to which knowledge production within the academy both shapes and is shaped by the media that it studies and with which its research is enabled. More specifically, it argues that the efficiency that has helped make search both a paradigmatic feature of digital culture and a habitual, everyday activity is achieved not just through speediness of results, but through a …
Speaking Philosophically: Communication at the Limits of Discursive Reason
Western philosophy has often claimed for itself not just a distinct sphere of knowledge, but a distinct form of communication, set against ordinary speech. In Speaking Philosophically, Thomas Sutherland proposes that for some philosophers, authentic philosophizing demands a specific manner of speaking or writing, adoption of which enables one to gesture toward truths that propositional speech will never grasp. Drawing on a variety of thinkers – H…
Plato’s Prescription: The Origin Myth of Media Theory
In certain corners of media theory, the fanciful origin myth of writing furnished in Plato’s Phaedrus, one of his most enigmatic and intricate dialogues, has in turn come to serve as the origin myth for media critique itself. And yet, having been committed to writing, this is an origin myth that underwrites both its own non-originarity and non-truth, its very status as a written text ensuring it will never meet the criteria it sets for a reasoned…
A Philosophy of Transport: Michel Serres’ Recursive Epistemology in the Hermes Pentalogy
Focusing upon the five books of his early Hermes series, this article argues that Michel Serres furnishes an accomplished, unconventional philosophical account of communication and mediation – a structuralist epistemology designed to comprehend the sciences in their complexity and plurality – that, even decades after its first publication, has significant value for media theory. Two key themes within this pentalogy are highlighted: firstly, its e…
Spectral Archives, Weird Sciences, Haunted Data
Review of the book Haunted Data: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science by Lisa Blackman
Peter Sloterdijk and the 'Security Architecture of Existence: Immunity, Autochthony, and Ontological Nativism
Centred on Foams, the third volume of his Spheres trilogy (2011, 2014, 2016), this article questions the privilege granted by Peter Sloterdijk to motifs of inclusion and exclusion, contending that, whilst his prioritization of dwelling as a central aspect of human existence (drawing in part upon the work of Martin Heidegger) provides a promising counterpoint to the dislocative and isolative effects of post-industrial capitalism, it is compromised…
Mapping the space of flows: Considerations and consequences
For many years now, scholars in geography, as well as other areas of the social sciences, have mounted a sustained challenge to the traditional theorisations of mapping which, in the words of Nigel Thrift (1996: 7), 'claim to re-present some naturally present reality'. There is, as such, little need to further rehearse such debates. 1 At the same time though, what we do need is greater theoretical intervention into the practices of representation…
Searching for stillness in the flux of the electric world: Vorticular media theory from Wyndham Lewis to Marshall McLuhan
Exploring the philosophical influence exercised by the works of Wyndham Lewis over Marshall McLuhan, this article contends that these two figures both sought to capture a momentary stillness through the figure of the vortex , first established in Lewis’s early contributions to the Vorticist art movement, a stillness that necessarily endures within the tumult of a world of electric media. What Lewis hoped to achieve through painting, McLuhan sough…
Thomas Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema
Review of the book 'Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema' by Thomas Elsaesser
Ontological Co-belonging in Peter Sloterdijk's Spherological Philosophy of Mediation
This article examines the ontology and politics of Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres trilogy, focusing in particular upon the notion of microspherical enclosure explicated in the first volume of this series. Noting Sloterdijk's unusual alignment of his philosophy with media theory, three main contentions are put forward. Firstly, that Sloterdijk's reconfiguration of Heidegger's fundamental ontology represents a largely unacknowledged renunciation of the…
"Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and the Interminable Half-Life of "So-Called Man
This article considers Friedrich Kittler’s deterministic media theory as both an appropriation and mutation of Michel Foucault’s archaeological method. Focusing on these two thinkers’ similar but divergent conceptions of the “death of man,” it will be argued that Kittler’s approach attempts to expunge archaeology of its last traces of Kantian transcendentalism by locating the causal agents of epistemic change (viz. media technologies) within the …
Philosophy of Media: A Short History of Ideas and Innovations from Socrates to Social Media
In Philosophy of Media, Hassan and Sutherland explore the philosophical and technological trajectory of media from Classical Greece until today, casting a new and revealing light upon the global media condition.
Philosophy of Media: A Short History of Ideas and Innovations from Socrates to Social Media
The entelechies of media: Formal and material causality in media ecology
Examining Marshall McLuhan’s idiosyncratic adoption of the Aristotelian concept of formal cause, this article contends that McLuhan’s emphasis upon form, and his refusal to engage with the question of materiality, traps his theory within a hylomorphic schema that considers mediation only in terms of its effects upon an audience, thus failing to take into account the configurational attributes of hardware itself. Comparing McLuhan’s media theory t…
The Monument to a Crisis’: Nietzsche and the Industrialization of Creativity
Friedrich Nietzsche describes Human, All Too Human, his third book to be published within his own lifetime, as a work of liberation: one that seeks to strip away the increasingly malignant influences – of Richard Wagner and Arthur Schopenhauer particularly – that he perceives as infecting his work. In this article, the author argues that it is more than just a rejection of these individual thinkers however, but instead represents a broad critique…
Intensive Mobilities: Figurations of the Nomad in Contemporary Theory
The figure of the nomad, representing the virtues of freedom, mobility, and exploration, is a frequently occurring trope within contemporary continental philosophy and social theory, derived chiefly from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This paper will interrogate the concept of nomadism, firstly in the philosophy of these two foundational thinkers, and then subsequently in the feminist and posthumanist theorizations of Rosi Braidot…
Getting nowhere fast: A teleological conception of socio-technical acceleration
It has been frequently recognized that the perceived acceleration of life that has been experienced from the Industrial Revolution onward is engendered, at least in part, by an understanding of speed as an end in itself. There is no equilibrium to be reached - no perfect speed - and as such, social processes are increasingly driven not by rational ends, but by an indeterminate demand for acceleration that both defines and restricts the decisional…
Communication, causation, and the logos
Eric McLuhan, the son of and frequent collaborator with the late Marshall McLuhan, has been instrumental in both formalizing and further popularizing the study of media ecology following his father
Clocks, calendars, and temporal abstraction
Liquid Networks and the Metaphysics of Flux: Ontologies of Flow in an Age of Speed and Mobility
It is common for social theorists to utilize the metaphors of 'flow', 'fluidity', and 'liquidity' in order to substantiate the ways in which speed and mobility form the basis for a new kind of information or network society. Yet rarely have these concepts been sufficiently theorized in order to establish their relevance or appropriateness. This article contends that the notion of flow as utilized in social theory is profoundly metaphysical in nat…
Intensive Mobilities: Figurations of the Nomad in Contemporary Theory
The figure of the nomad, representing the virtues of freedom, mobility, and exploration, is a frequently occurring trope within contemporary continental philosophy and social theory, derived chiefly from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This paper will interrogate the concept of nomadism, firstly in the philosophy of these two foundational thinkers, and then subsequently in the feminist and posthumanist theorizations of Rosi Braidot…
Getting nowhere fast: A teleological conception of socio-technical acceleration
It has been frequently recognized that the perceived acceleration of life that has been experienced from the Industrial Revolution onward is engendered, at least in part, by an understanding of speed as an end in itself. There is no equilibrium to be reached - no perfect speed - and as such, social processes are increasingly driven not by rational ends, but by an indeterminate demand for acceleration that both defines and restricts the decisional…
Liquid Networks and the Metaphysics of Flux: Ontologies of Flow in an Age of Speed and Mobility
It is common for social theorists to utilize the metaphors of 'flow', 'fluidity', and 'liquidity' in order to substantiate the ways in which speed and mobility form the basis for a new kind of information or network society. Yet rarely have these concepts been sufficiently theorized in order to establish their relevance or appropriateness. This article contends that the notion of flow as utilized in social theory is profoundly metaphysical in nat…
Peter Sloterdijk and the 'Security Architecture of Existence: Immunity, Autochthony, and Ontological Nativism
Centred on Foams, the third volume of his Spheres trilogy (2011, 2014, 2016), this article questions the privilege granted by Peter Sloterdijk to motifs of inclusion and exclusion, contending that, whilst his prioritization of dwelling as a central aspect of human existence (drawing in part upon the work of Martin Heidegger) provides a promising counterpoint to the dislocative and isolative effects of post-industrial capitalism, it is compromised…
Ontological Co-belonging in Peter Sloterdijk's Spherological Philosophy of Mediation
This article examines the ontology and politics of Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres trilogy, focusing in particular upon the notion of microspherical enclosure explicated in the first volume of this series. Noting Sloterdijk's unusual alignment of his philosophy with media theory, three main contentions are put forward. Firstly, that Sloterdijk's reconfiguration of Heidegger's fundamental ontology represents a largely unacknowledged renunciation of the…
The entelechies of media: Formal and material causality in media ecology
Examining Marshall McLuhan’s idiosyncratic adoption of the Aristotelian concept of formal cause, this article contends that McLuhan’s emphasis upon form, and his refusal to engage with the question of materiality, traps his theory within a hylomorphic schema that considers mediation only in terms of its effects upon an audience, thus failing to take into account the configurational attributes of hardware itself. Comparing McLuhan’s media theory t…
Speaking Philosophically: Communication at the Limits of Discursive Reason
Western philosophy has often claimed for itself not just a distinct sphere of knowledge, but a distinct form of communication, set against ordinary speech. In Speaking Philosophically, Thomas Sutherland proposes that for some philosophers, authentic philosophizing demands a specific manner of speaking or writing, adoption of which enables one to gesture toward truths that propositional speech will never grasp. Drawing on a variety of thinkers – H…
Clocks, calendars, and temporal abstraction
Communication, causation, and the logos
Eric McLuhan, the son of and frequent collaborator with the late Marshall McLuhan, has been instrumental in both formalizing and further popularizing the study of media ecology following his father
Clocks, calendars, and temporal abstraction
Liquid Networks and the Metaphysics of Flux: Ontologies of Flow in an Age of Speed and Mobility
It is common for social theorists to utilize the metaphors of 'flow', 'fluidity', and 'liquidity' in order to substantiate the ways in which speed and mobility form the basis for a new kind of information or network society. Yet rarely have these concepts been sufficiently theorized in order to establish their relevance or appropriateness. This article contends that the notion of flow as utilized in social theory is profoundly metaphysical in nat…
The entelechies of media: Formal and material causality in media ecology
Examining Marshall McLuhan’s idiosyncratic adoption of the Aristotelian concept of formal cause, this article contends that McLuhan’s emphasis upon form, and his refusal to engage with the question of materiality, traps his theory within a hylomorphic schema that considers mediation only in terms of its effects upon an audience, thus failing to take into account the configurational attributes of hardware itself. Comparing McLuhan’s media theory t…
The Monument to a Crisis’: Nietzsche and the Industrialization of Creativity
Friedrich Nietzsche describes Human, All Too Human, his third book to be published within his own lifetime, as a work of liberation: one that seeks to strip away the increasingly malignant influences – of Richard Wagner and Arthur Schopenhauer particularly – that he perceives as infecting his work. In this article, the author argues that it is more than just a rejection of these individual thinkers however, but instead represents a broad critique…
Intensive Mobilities: Figurations of the Nomad in Contemporary Theory
The figure of the nomad, representing the virtues of freedom, mobility, and exploration, is a frequently occurring trope within contemporary continental philosophy and social theory, derived chiefly from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This paper will interrogate the concept of nomadism, firstly in the philosophy of these two foundational thinkers, and then subsequently in the feminist and posthumanist theorizations of Rosi Braidot…
Getting nowhere fast: A teleological conception of socio-technical acceleration
It has been frequently recognized that the perceived acceleration of life that has been experienced from the Industrial Revolution onward is engendered, at least in part, by an understanding of speed as an end in itself. There is no equilibrium to be reached - no perfect speed - and as such, social processes are increasingly driven not by rational ends, but by an indeterminate demand for acceleration that both defines and restricts the decisional…
Philosophy of Media: A Short History of Ideas and Innovations from Socrates to Social Media
In Philosophy of Media, Hassan and Sutherland explore the philosophical and technological trajectory of media from Classical Greece until today, casting a new and revealing light upon the global media condition.
Philosophy of Media: A Short History of Ideas and Innovations from Socrates to Social Media
Ontological Co-belonging in Peter Sloterdijk's Spherological Philosophy of Mediation
This article examines the ontology and politics of Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres trilogy, focusing in particular upon the notion of microspherical enclosure explicated in the first volume of this series. Noting Sloterdijk's unusual alignment of his philosophy with media theory, three main contentions are put forward. Firstly, that Sloterdijk's reconfiguration of Heidegger's fundamental ontology represents a largely unacknowledged renunciation of the…
"Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and the Interminable Half-Life of "So-Called Man
This article considers Friedrich Kittler’s deterministic media theory as both an appropriation and mutation of Michel Foucault’s archaeological method. Focusing on these two thinkers’ similar but divergent conceptions of the “death of man,” it will be argued that Kittler’s approach attempts to expunge archaeology of its last traces of Kantian transcendentalism by locating the causal agents of epistemic change (viz. media technologies) within the …
Mapping the space of flows: Considerations and consequences
For many years now, scholars in geography, as well as other areas of the social sciences, have mounted a sustained challenge to the traditional theorisations of mapping which, in the words of Nigel Thrift (1996: 7), 'claim to re-present some naturally present reality'. There is, as such, little need to further rehearse such debates. 1 At the same time though, what we do need is greater theoretical intervention into the practices of representation…
Searching for stillness in the flux of the electric world: Vorticular media theory from Wyndham Lewis to Marshall McLuhan
Exploring the philosophical influence exercised by the works of Wyndham Lewis over Marshall McLuhan, this article contends that these two figures both sought to capture a momentary stillness through the figure of the vortex , first established in Lewis’s early contributions to the Vorticist art movement, a stillness that necessarily endures within the tumult of a world of electric media. What Lewis hoped to achieve through painting, McLuhan sough…
Thomas Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema
Review of the book 'Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema' by Thomas Elsaesser
Peter Sloterdijk and the 'Security Architecture of Existence: Immunity, Autochthony, and Ontological Nativism
Centred on Foams, the third volume of his Spheres trilogy (2011, 2014, 2016), this article questions the privilege granted by Peter Sloterdijk to motifs of inclusion and exclusion, contending that, whilst his prioritization of dwelling as a central aspect of human existence (drawing in part upon the work of Martin Heidegger) provides a promising counterpoint to the dislocative and isolative effects of post-industrial capitalism, it is compromised…
Spectral Archives, Weird Sciences, Haunted Data
Review of the book Haunted Data: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science by Lisa Blackman
A Philosophy of Transport: Michel Serres’ Recursive Epistemology in the Hermes Pentalogy
Focusing upon the five books of his early Hermes series, this article argues that Michel Serres furnishes an accomplished, unconventional philosophical account of communication and mediation – a structuralist epistemology designed to comprehend the sciences in their complexity and plurality – that, even decades after its first publication, has significant value for media theory. Two key themes within this pentalogy are highlighted: firstly, its e…
Plato’s Prescription: The Origin Myth of Media Theory
In certain corners of media theory, the fanciful origin myth of writing furnished in Plato’s Phaedrus, one of his most enigmatic and intricate dialogues, has in turn come to serve as the origin myth for media critique itself. And yet, having been committed to writing, this is an origin myth that underwrites both its own non-originarity and non-truth, its very status as a written text ensuring it will never meet the criteria it sets for a reasoned…
Speaking Philosophically: Communication at the Limits of Discursive Reason
Western philosophy has often claimed for itself not just a distinct sphere of knowledge, but a distinct form of communication, set against ordinary speech. In Speaking Philosophically, Thomas Sutherland proposes that for some philosophers, authentic philosophizing demands a specific manner of speaking or writing, adoption of which enables one to gesture toward truths that propositional speech will never grasp. Drawing on a variety of thinkers – H…
The Pathos of Finitude
Although it is sometimes construed as a mere negation of philosophical discourse, François Laruelle maintains that there is a positive side to his project of “nonphilosophy.” Often this takes the form of a defense of the “ordinary man,” a faceless individual, without qualities, defined by absolute finitude. Laruelle claims to articulate a rigorous science of man, capable of thinking human individuals in their essence, outside the philosophical in…
(Re)search results: Search Engines and the Logic of Efficiency in Scholarship
This article uses the search engine as a heuristic for reflecting upon the extent to which knowledge production within the academy both shapes and is shaped by the media that it studies and with which its research is enabled. More specifically, it argues that the efficiency that has helped make search both a paradigmatic feature of digital culture and a habitual, everyday activity is achieved not just through speediness of results, but through a …
Technocritique and its limits: Éric Sadin on human dignity in the face of artificial intelligence
Examining the work of French writer, philosopher, and ‘technocritic’ Éric Sadin, with a particular focus on his fears regarding artificial intelligence systems’ infiltration into numerous facets of human affairs, their imposition of a ‘universal technical principle’ upon all aspects of our lives, and their anthropomorphic and alētheic characteristics, this article argues that whilst Sadin's polemical writings provide a useful corrective to more c…
Sociology (18 works) · Epistemology (17 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Law (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Art (8 works) · Law (8 works)