Mark Carrigan

Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

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What might a glitch aesthetic entail when applied to concept work within social theory? 6 speculative propositions

  1. Disruption and destabilization: Glitches disrupt the smooth, expected functioning of systems. Analogously, a glitch aesthetic in social theory might deliberately introduce disruptive or destabilizing elements into social models and frameworks to challenge assumptions and reveal hidden dynamics or contradictions.
  2. Fragmentation and recombination: Glitches often manifest as fragmented, jumbled data. In social theory, this could translate to breaking down existing concepts and recombining them in novel, unexpected ways to generate new insights and theoretical approaches.
  3. Embracing noise and error: Glitches often incorporate visual noise, artifacts, and apparent errors. A glitch aesthetic in social theory might involve deliberately including or even embracing elements that seem noisy, erroneous, or marginal to dominant discourses, as a way of expanding the space of social inquiry.
  4. Revelation through malfunction: Glitches can expose the underlying structure or code of a system. Similarly, a glitch aesthetic in social theory could seek to reveal the hidden structures, power dynamics, and generative mechanisms underlying social phenomena, precisely by looking at moments of social “malfunction” or breakdown.
  5. Aesthetics of the digital: Glitch art often foregrounds the digital materiality of contemporary media. Applying this to social theory could involve engaging more directly with the digital mediation of social life, and how digital technologies and infrastructures shape social realities in ways that may be glitch-like or unpredictable.
  6. Critique through distortion: Glitch art can be seen as a form of critique, using distortion to denaturalize and problematize dominant visual regimes. In social theory, a glitch aesthetic could serve a similar critical function, using conceptual “distortion” to denaturalize dominant social paradigms and ideologies.

This is how Claude 3 responded to a one sentence prompt. It’s a real question which occurred to me in a seminar earlier. But the capacity of Claude to answer it on my behalf is rather unsettling. What lesson should we take from this? Claude itself is characteristically reassuring, suggesting a number of points to consider:

Theoretical innovation: The ability of AI to generate novel combinations of ideas and unexpected mappings could be a powerful tool for theoretical innovation, suggesting new directions for inquiry that human theorists might not have otherwise considered. However, the ultimate value of these innovations will depend on how human theorists critically engage with, refine, and extend them.

Collaboration and critique: The relationship between human theorists and AI tools like myself should be one of collaboration and mutual critique. Human theorists can provide the contextual grounding, ethical judgment, and critical perspective necessary to meaningfully direct and interpret AI-generated insights. At the same time, AI can challenge human theorists to question their assumptions, consider new possibilities, and engage with the rapidly evolving technological contexts of social life.

Under these conditions I believe that avant-garde theorising is going to have to die a death. The idea that innovation at the level of conceptual vocabulary is inherently progressive becomes actively dangerous when everyone has access to a machinery for immediate terminological innovation, with the only constraint being the degree to which their robophobia and lack of imagination stops them using it.

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