(In)visible Generations: Anarchist Technologies and Embodied Resistance

Abstract

This project investigates the employment of new media technologies toward anarchistic revolutionary purposes in three postmodern texts: Williams S. Burroughs’s Nova Trilogy, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, and Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles. Spanning over three decades, these texts examine the continuous need for anarchist organizations to develop new and generative practices of resistant tactics against authoritarian hegemonic forces in order to remain relevant. This thesis explores how media technologies are used by these anarchist groups in order to break both the body and technology out of instrumentalizing purposes by apparatuses of control. In developing new embodiments that exist beyond the categorizations of power and authority, these authors demonstrate ways in which anarchist organizations are able to subvert the increasingly networked machinations of control and create potential embodied sites of resistance outside the realm of domination.