Abstract
In dominant Western contexts, vulnerability is frequently treated through regimes of fear, security, and threat, where it appears as weakness, deficit, or deviation from ideals of autonomy and independence. Within these arrangements, vulnerability is handled as a condition to be managed through systems of protection, governance, and care, producing what this thesis names the vulnerable subject.
Against this framing, the artistic practice-as-research thesis develops the concept of vulnerable subjectivity, articulated through performative methods in which vulnerability is approached non-negatively and susceptibility to effect forms part of the artistic praxis. In these contexts, vulnerability is not treated as a condition to be repaired or overcome but as a material and embodied capacity for presence that can be trained, cultivated, and worked with as a creative and intelligent mode of attention, reception, and action.
Following Félix Guattari’s polyphonic and heterogenetic conception of subjectivity, the thesis expands the field of vulnerability and its directionality, tracing movements between interior and exterior registers. Chapter One maps vulnerability across modern socio-political institutions, feminist engagements with the sovereign subject, social reproduction discourse, and ethics of care, figuring the vulnerable subject and indicating the limits of thinking with vulnerability without additional parallel fields. Chapter Two examines new scenes of vulnerability emerging in the post-globalization era of computational capitalism, where infrastructures, platforms, and algorithmic systems reorganize how vulnerability becomes visible and operational. The chapter investigates experimental responses to these conditions across design and infrastructural imaginaries, including through the author's engagement with the collective design project ReUnion Network and research on LARP as a field of co-creating non-competitive collective narratives. Chapter Three turns to performative practices grounded in attention, among them Gaga movement language, Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening, Jerald Schwiebert's methods for expression capacity, and a constellation of interdisciplinary artworks by the author coalescing around the screen performance House Rules (2020). In an iterative, processual, and horizontal approach, these practices reveal vulnerable subjectivity as embodied praxis constituted by susceptibility, attention, and interaction of forces.
The thesis advances a political and aesthetic proposal that expands how vulnerability can be understood and practiced. By articulating susceptibility as intelligent praxis, it seeks to loosen externally shaped and learned patterns of response and to multiply and diversify possible trajectories of intentional action. In doing so, it develops capacities to receive, engage, attenuate, or amplify forces. It thus contributes to broader conceptions of productivity, value, relation, and social architectures within care and vulnerability discourses, while attending to the complex layers of vulnerability lived within artistic practices that move within and beyond institutions of fear.
Submission: May 3rd, 2026. Defense: expected July, 2026, at Royal Holloway, University of London, Department Media Arts.
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