Technology and social space beyond the modern episteme

This dissertation concerns the relations between technology and social space. It traces, on the one hand, modernist approaches to these questions; but then, on the other hand, attempts to find alternative ways to approach these questions through the work of Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Henri Lefebvre. It posits an a-modern, machinic approach to technology and the social that focusses on the distribution of agency rather than the modern preoccupation with identity and the Kantian separation of time and space.My object of interest in this dissertation is the relation of a new technological assemblage of communication and information technologies to a new social space, and I approach this through a consideration of a vision of the possibilities of this new social space. This vision concerns a social space where human agency has greatly expanded due to these new technologies. It is present, among other places, in the narratives and images presented by AT&T in its television commercials, by Ameritech in its Communication Exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and by the media in their coverage of the creation of an Information Superhighway by the U.S. Government. It is this vision that I wish to critique by stepping outside the modern episteme, and hope in this way to begin to suggest strategies by which we may struggle to construct a more equitable distribution of global flows of information and power.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio