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Born in 1978, Grant Vetter spent most of his life in Southern California where he eventually completed his studies as an artist at the Art Center College of Design (ACCD) and the University of California, Irvine (UCI) where he also received an emphasis degree in critical theory from the Critical Theory Institute (CTI). He went on to complete both a second masters in Media and Communications as well as a Ph.D. in Art, Politics and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School (EGS). He has been an instructor at the School for Science and Architecture (SCI-Arch), Arizona State University (ASU) and many other prestigious institutions.

Vetter wrote his first significant academic study on Nietzsche and Art under the title of “Non-Similar Similitude: Nietzschean Aesthetics and the Eternal Return of the Same”. The essay set out to examine the different cultural meanings associated with the concept of the Eternal Return as it relates to art by linking the idea of eternal reoccurrence and the will-to-power with the work of developmental psychologists like Piaget, Pascual-Leone, Commons, Alexander, Fischer, Sinnot and Labouvie-Veif. This foray into the social sciences allowed Vetter to create a new reading of how we understand the Eternal Return by correlating different epochs of art production with the role that art plays in cognitive adaption. Vetter’s strong refutation of the canonical interpretations of eternal reoccurrence by Karl Löwith and Joan Stambaugh built on the wave of post-structuralist interpretations of the Nietzschean corpus that fell under the moniker of “the New Nietzsche”. His insightful and pragmatic reading of the concpet was praised by many Nietzsche scholars including Fred Ulfers.

Vetter’s master thesis, “Hyperbolic Capitalism: From postmodernism to the neo-Baroque”, was considered to be an original contribution to the theorization of the neo-Baroque or “the post-Postmodern condition”. Going beyond the conceptualization of culture put forth by Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard, Vetter set out to resolve a key conflict in the theorization of a newly emergent logic in cultural production during the 90s that had created a paradigmatic rift between the new theorists of beauty, such as Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Dave Hickey, and Mario Perniola, and the defenders of relational aesthetics like Nicholas Bourriaud, Claire Bishop, and Nato Thompson. Vetter’s thesis demonstrated that the first of these two groups had theorized how exterior states of the body were being subsumed by, and redesigned through technological manipulation, while and the second group provided a reconsideration of the expanded awareness of interior states of being, intersubjectivity and the theater of motivated interactions in the public sphere. Vetter successfully defended the notion that both positions qualified as neo-Baroque phenomenon, albeit split across an internal-subjectivist and external-collectivist axis. Thus, it is easy to see how Vetter’s far-reaching examination of the ways in which the neo-Baroque was based on the production of extreme forms of beauty, the threat of the technological sublime, and the passion play of bodies in space, all helped to lay the groundwork for his later study of subjectivation and social control. As such, we can say that Vetter’s work helped to cognitively map the emergence of a new cultural logic – the neo-Baroque - along with the many other notable accounts by scholars like Angela Ndalianis, Sean Cubbit, and Omar Calabrese.

Vetter’s unpublished 900 page opus on molecular psychology, The Birth of a Real-Time Politik, combined the most relevant aspects of depth psychology with quantum mechanics in order to give us a thoroughgoing analysis of cognitive and/or affective capitalism on society at large. In it he describes the process of subjectivation through transactional analysis and the language of particle physics. Vetter studied with Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Michael Hardt while he was drafting the manuscript which could be best described as Vetter’s fundamental attempt to produce a reliable epistemological account of the effects of capitalism on social relations. The unpublished manuscript is Vetter’s committed but ultimately flawed attempt to reunite the origins of materialist philosophy with materialist politics as a means of renewing the aims of Deleuzian-Guattarian vitalism and/or the practice of schizo-analysis. While authors like Manuel Delanda took Deleuze in a realist direction; and Hardt-Negri took his work in a political direction; and Brian Massumi took Deleuze’s work in the direction of affect theory; Vetter’s contribution to schizo-analysis and the psychological experience of being a BwO, remains something of a furtive ‘fourth way’ in Post-Deleuzian analysis that is only just beginning to be explored by other philosophers today.

Despite this fact, many of the insights from this text appear in Vetter’s next work, The Architecture of Control: A Contribution Towards the Critique of the Science of Apparatuses (TAOC), which sought to update Foucault’s reevaluation of how we understand the effects of Panopticism on modern life. In TAOC, one can feel the influence of Deleuze’s “Post-Script on Societies of Control” on nearly every page of the book, and it is certainly what allowed Vetter’s project to evolve from being focused on molecular psychology to what he later deemed a sub-atomizing physics of social control that builds on the affects of social ionization and the effects of indo-colonization. In this work Vetter created an entirely new language for understanding the construction of ‘perfected subjects’ rather than ‘normative’ ones, where subjectivization is built upon enterrogatory discipline, inferrogatory infomatics, modulated (in)dividualism, auto-affective attunement and the perpetual re-inscription of incentivizing injunctions across the whole of the body socius by Kapital. Vetter’s single most important claim in TAOC is that we have finally moved beyond Panopticism and Neo-Panopticism into a regime of control that could rightly be called Fiberopticism, and that all radical politics will have to contend with this new reality as the relationship of power/knowledge becomes ever more machinational under neoliberalism.

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The book was well received in the fields of architectural theory, surveillance studies and philosophy, garnering glowing endorsements from Mark Poster, William Bogard, and others. When compared with the previous generation of postmodern thinkers, Vetter’s theorization of Fiberopticism is perhaps the most trenchant critique of Bentham’s social philosophy and the Panopticon to date; Vetter’s model of a sub-atomizing physics of social control helped to bring a renewed sense of relevance to Foucault’s analysis of the microphysics of power; Vetter’s theories of social ionization follow from Debord’s writings about the spectacularization of society: and Vetter’s notion of determination in the first instance provides a complete rethinking of Althusser’s account of the connection of interpolation to the concept of determination in the last lnstant. Finally, much of Vetter’s work can be seen as foreshadowing the diagnosis put forth by Byung-Chul Han in The Burnout Society because Vetter’s theory of a society of ‘perfected subjects’ is largely synonymous with Han’s description of ‘achievement subjects’. Most importantly however, are the many ways that Vetter’s theorization of intensive subsumption as the direct conscription of life by capital, finally moves us beyond the horizon of investigations that Marx first outlined with the terms formal and real subsumption, not to mention how this new phase of political economy has dramatic consequences for how we conceptualize the process of subjectivation and the future prospects of human agency.

Vetter is currently writing “The Future(s) of Art”, a text that brings together integral psychology with the concerns of continental aesthetics in an effort to overcome many of the contradictions of his earlier work. “Future(s)” points to a more holistic path for individual and collective interests to engage in both progressive politics and forms of cultural production that resist hyperbolic capitalism in order to challenge the fragmented, saturated and schizoid condition of the psyche in the era of generalized precarity.

Vetter has shown his art both nationally and internationally. Today he is an educator and an independent curator. Some of his most important exhibitions are: Psychogeografik (2018-19) | A Matter of Public Record: Art in the Age of Mass Surveillance I & II (2018-2019) | The Fate of Landscape Painting (2017) | Abstraction in the Singular (2017) | East of Eden: Karen Finley and Bruce Yonemoto (2016) | Parables of the Virtual (2016) | Geometry in the Expanded Field (2016) | Landscape at Escape Velocity (2016) | In Advance of Identity (2015) | The Status of Portraiture (2014) | The De-socialized Landscape (2013) | Painting on Edge I & II (2012-14) | Speculative Materialism: Abstract Art and it's Conditions I & II (2012-13) | Pacific Non-Standard Time: FAR (Foundation for Art Resources) (2012) | Action (Un)Packed: Abstraction After Action (2011)