
Infinite Ontologies of the Chthulustream
Posthumanism and Racial Capital in Contemporary Streaming Media
Edinburgh University Press
Published on 31. August 2025
Book
Hardback
400 pages
978-1-3995-4980-6 (ISBN)
Description
Brown and Fleming employ the twin discourses of critical race theory and posthumanism in order to expose how multinational platforms like Netflix play a role in both problematising and perpetuating deeply entrenched violences lurking within the intersections of racism, capitalism, and technology. The authors dive into the racialised world-building of shows like Stranger Things, Watchmen, Lovecraft Country, Sense8, The Twilight Zone, The O.A., Ad Vitam and DEVS, and through their groundbreaking media philosophy diagnose and confront the oppressive and racialising nature of streaming media at the end of the world, in the so-called Chthulucene (or 'Chthulustream'). As Brown and Fleming demonstrate, streaming media can, at their best, liberate thought to confront overlapping infinite ontologies (?O) that themselves offer a timely panacea and corrective to Object-Oriented-Ontology (OOO).
Reviews / Votes
A theoretically sophisticated, highly energetic, cognitopoetic passage through the media ecologies of computational racial capitalism, with serious attention to the B-side of popular culture as here revealed by original and compelling concatenations of key concepts from Marxist, Critical Race and Media Theory. Brown and Fleming mobilize a Hunter S. Thompson meets Sylvia Wynter analytic prose to parse the mycological, cephalopodic, algorithmic formations of meaning and violence - this latter, a Lovecraftian synthesis that, as they demonstrate, has become increasingly unavoidable in a digitized, racialized and colonized world immersed in self-made yet nonetheless cosmic crisis. * Jonathan Beller, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, English, and Film Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
5 B&W
Dimensions
Height: 236 mm
Width: 159 mm
Thickness: 28 mm
Weight
718 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-3995-4980-6 (9781399549806)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
William Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Roehampton, London. He is the author of various books, including Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (Berghahn, 2013). He is also a maker of micro-budget films, including En Attendant Godard (2009), Selfie (2014) and This is Cinema (2019). David H. Fleming is a Senior Lecturer in the Communications, Media and Culture Division at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Unbecoming Cinema (2017) and co-author of Squid Cinema from Hell (2020, EUP) and Chinese Urban Shi-nema (2020). He is also co-editor of Cinema, Identities and Beyond (2009).
Author
Senior Lecturer in FilmUniversity of British Columbia
Senior LecturerUniversity of Stirling
Content
Introduction: The Mantle of the Beast; Or, Starting in the Middle (Passage)
Superposition I: Ontological Whiteness and/as Antiblackness
1. Ad Vitam
2. Stranger Things
3. The O.A
Superposition II: Paraontological Blackness
4. The Twilight Zone
5. Watchmen
6. Lovecraft Country
Superposition III: Ornamental Others and Foreigners Within
7. DEVS
8. Sense8
Conclusion: I May Destroy You... High Flying Birds
Superposition I: Ontological Whiteness and/as Antiblackness
1. Ad Vitam
2. Stranger Things
3. The O.A
Superposition II: Paraontological Blackness
4. The Twilight Zone
5. Watchmen
6. Lovecraft Country
Superposition III: Ornamental Others and Foreigners Within
7. DEVS
8. Sense8
Conclusion: I May Destroy You... High Flying Birds