My research explores why we are failing to navigate emerging security crises and how conceptual engineering in political theory might help us adapt to such conditions more effectively.
My first book, Noir Materialism: Freedom and Obligation in Political Ecology, is available now from Bloomsbury Publishing (recently reviewed in Theory & Event 29:1). My second book, Theory of the Alien: Astropolitics, Spacepower, and the Outside, is forthcoming from Routledge. The book characterizes outer space as a fundamentally political domain and develops a philosophical anthropology adequate to Space Age conditions. Its central claim is that our political, spatial, and strategic imagination is underwritten by categories of the exogenous – or what is considered to be “outside” the scope of the traditionally political – and that the opening of space as an economic and military frontier forces these categories into view. The book articulates a concept of the astropolitical as a framework for thinking politics beyond the terrestrial nomos; develops an infrastructural or tentacular theory of spacepower that breaks with the geopolitical inheritance of seapower and airpower theory (including littoral framings of spacepower); and proposes a planetary mythotechnics – that is, strategic mythmaking as the technical means by which a political form of life such as the human discovers and defines itself in the traffic between homeworld (the familiar) and alienworld (what lies outside it). The argument moves through the politics of the space community and the United States Space Force, the future of territory and war, the conceptual history of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, and political theory at a planetary scale. Critical interlocutors include Carl Schmitt, Bleddyn E. Bowen, Bernard Stiegler, Bernhard Waldenfels, Helmuth Plessner, and Hans Blumenberg. Related material will appear soon as a chapter in an edited volume from Stanford University Press, and complementary work has appeared in Vault of Culture and Limina. I am developing new material for a book tentatively titled The Esoteric State: Military-Industrial Imaginaries and the Politics of Secret Worldbuilding.
More generally, my research interests include contemporary political theory; philosophical anthropology; political geography and military psychogeography; the philosophy of technology (especially Gilbert Simondon); intelligence history and security studies; and film and literary criticism. Longer-term research projects include an intensive study of CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton and an extended philosophical treatment of vitalist rationalism. In addition to my research program, I write sporadically on topics that interest me (conceptual engineering, geopolitics, risk, and weird media) at Gray Sky Thinking and direct Strangeways Idea Lab, an independent research and working group focused on exploring strange new ways of thinking about technics and technology.