Defense Date

1-28-2025

Graduation Date

Spring 5-8-2025

Availability

One-year Embargo

Submission Type

dissertation

Department

Communication and Rhetorical Studies

School

McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts

Committee Chair

Anthony Wachs

Committee Member

Erik Garrett

Committee Member

Garnet Butchart

Keywords

Deconstruction, data, digital media, Jacques Derrida, phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, existentialism, philosophy of technology, philosophy of communication, media theory

Abstract

This project argues that digital technologies call for a new problematic of communication, centered around the conditions of (im)possibility for creating perfect digital profiles of users as generated from user data. Beginning with Edmund Husserl’s analysis of essentially occasional expressions, this dissertation posits that user data occurs on three levels: (1) the level of expression, where a user wants-to-say something through their inputs, (2) the level of facticity, where biometric data are involuntarily produced by the user, and (3) the level of nothingness, where the user’s inaction, such as not-answering, is taken as data. Moving beyond what Husserl’s framework can say, however, this project proposes that the third level of nothingness always already supplements the other two levels. As such, data is characterized according to what Jacques Derrida would call a (quasi-)transcendental aporia: communication by way of perfect mechanical repetition that coincides with the totality of my existence is only possible because what is nothingness to me and never corresponds to my existence is also communicated as negative data that I can neither anticipate nor think. Following Kierkegaard and Heidegger, the nothingness that data appends to me comes to experience by way of anxiety, which ultimately enables us to think, in a single concept, two categories that Derrida identified as contradictory: the machine and the event. The aporetic relation of the machine and event in data leads to a new conceptualization of communication that is neither the problematic of transcendental subjects perfectly reactivating ideas across disparate minds, nor the endless deferral of meaning by way of language’s internal differences. Instead, digital communication is (im)possible as the perfect repetition of being that is always already appended by nothingness.

Language

English

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