James Tenney: META⌿HODOS and META Meta⌿Hodos: A Phenomenology of 20th Century Musical Materials and an Approach to the Study of Form (1964/1988)

One of the great music theory books of the 20th century, by a thought-provoking composer. One of earliest applications of gestalt theory and cognitive science to music.

Originally published by the Inter-American Institute for Musical Research, Tulane University, New Orleans, 1964 (META-HODOS), and the Journal of Experimental Aesthetics 1.1, 1977 (“META Meta-Hodos”)
Edited by Larry Polansky
Second edition
Publisher Frog Peak Music, Oakland/CA, 1988
ISBN 0945996004, 9780945996002
116 pages

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Seth Kim-Cohen: In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art (2009)

An ear-opening reassessment of sonic art from World War II to the present.

Marcel Duchamp famously championed a “non-retinal” visual art, rejecting judgments of taste and beauty. In the Blink of an Ear is the first book to ask why the sonic arts did not experience a parallel turn toward a non-cochlear sonic art, imagined as both a response and a complement to Duchamp’s conceptualism. Rather than treat sound art as an artistic practice unto itself—or as the unwanted child of music—artist and theorist Seth Kim-Cohen relates the post-War sonic arts to contemporaneous movements in the gallery arts. Applying key ideas from poststructuralism, deconstruction, and art history, In the Blink of an Ear suggests that the sonic arts have been subject to the same cultural pressures that have shaped minimalism, conceptualism, appropriation, and relational aesthetics. Sonic practice and theory have downplayed – or, in many cases, completely rejected – the de-formalization of the artwork and its simultaneous animation in the conceptual realm.

Starting in 1948, the simultaneous examples of John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer initiated a sonic theory-in-practice, fusing clement Greenberg’s media-specificity with a phenomenological emphasis on perception. Subsequently, the “sound-in-itself” tendency has become the dominant paradigm for the production and reception of sound art. Engaged with critical texts by Jacques Derrida, Rosalind Krauss, Friedrich Kittler, Jean François Lyotard, and Jacques Attali, among others, Seth Kim-Cohen convincingly argues for a reassessment of the short history of sound art, rejecting sound-in-itself in favor of a reading of sound’s expanded situation and its uncontainable textuality. At the same time, this important book establishes the principles for a nascent non-cochlear sonic practice, embracing the inevitable interaction of sound with the social, the linguistic, the philosophical, the political, and the technological.

Artists discussed include: George Brecht, John Cage, Janet Cardiff, Marcel Duchamp, Bob Dylan, Valie Export, Luc Ferrari, Jarrod Fowler, Jacob Kirkegaard, Alvin Lucier, Robert Morris, Muddy Waters, John Oswald, Marina Rosenfeld, Pierre Schaeffer, Stephen Vitiello, La Monte Young

Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, New York/London, 2009
ISBN 082642970X, 9780826429704
296 pages

review (Laura Paolini, MusicWorks)
review (Brian Kane, NonSite)

publisher
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Ian James: The New French Philosophy (2012)

This book gives a critical assessment of key developments in contemporary French philosophy, highlighting the diverse ways in which recent French thought has moved beyond the philosophical positions and arguments which have been widely associated with the terms ‘post-structuralism’ and ‘postmodernism’. These developments are assessed through a close comparative reading of the work of seven contemporary thinkers: Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou and François Laruelle.

The book situates the writing of each philosopher in relation to earlier traditions of French thought. In differing ways, these philosophers decisively distance themselves from the linguistic paradigm which dominated so much twentieth-century thought in order to rethink philosophical conceptions of materiality, worldliness, shared embodied existence and human agency or subjectivity. They thereby open the way for a radical renewal of the claims, possibilities and transformative power of philosophical thinking itself.

This book will be an indispensable text for students of philosophy and for anyone interested in current developments in philosophy and social thought.

Publisher Polity, April 2012
ISBN 0745648053, 9780745648057
220 pages

review (Marjorie Gracieuse, review31)
review (Shelly Walia, Spectrum)

publisher
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Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, No. 13: Special Issue on Affect (2011)

“This special issue of Parrhesia has developed from the 2010 Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy’s Conference at the University of Queensland on the theme of the philosophy of affect. [..]

The issue contributes to the “affective turn” by engaging in studies of affect grounded in non-dualist ontologies and by considering affect in relation to the work of art. The collection also works against the narrowly defined “turn” by providing nuanced readings of philosophers understood by the “turn” only in clichéd terms, as ultra-rationalist or anaffective.” (from the Introduction)

With contributions by Antonio Calcagno, Sara Heinämaa, Paul Redding, Bernard Stiegler, Geoff Boucher, Max Deutscher, Paul Formosa, Stuart Grant, Jane Lymer, Matthew Sharpe, Marie Christine Tams, Magdalena Zolkos, and Robert Sinnerbrink.

Edited by Marguerite La Caze and Henry Martyn Lloyd
Publisher Open Humanities Press
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
ISSN 1834-3287
210 pages

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Peter Sloterdijk: The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice (2010/2012)

In his best-selling book You Must Change Your Life, Peter Sloterdijk argued exercise and practice were crucial to the human condition. In The Art of Philosophy, he extends this critique to academic science and scholarship, casting the training processes of academic study as key to the production of sophisticated thought. Infused with humor and provocative insight, The Art of Philosophy further integrates philosophy and human existence, richly detailing the foundations of this relationship and its transformative role in making the postmodern self.

Sloterdijk begins with Plato’s description of Socrates, whose internal monologues were so absorbing they often rooted the philosopher in place. The original academy, Sloterdijk argues, taught scholars to lose themselves in thought, and today’s universities continue this tradition by offering scope for Plato’s “accommodations for absences.” By training scholars to practice thinking as an occupation transcending daily time and space, universities create the environment in which thought makes wisdom possible. Traversing the history of asceticism, the concept of suspended animation, and the theory of the neutral observer, Sloterdijk traces the evolution of philosophical practice from ancient times to today, showing how scholars can remain true to the tradition of “the examined life” even when the temporal dimension no longer corresponds to the eternal. Building on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Arendt, and other practitioners of the life of theory, Sloterdijk launches a posthumanist defense of philosophical inquiry and its everyday, therapeutic value.

Originally published as Scheintod im Denken, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2010
Translated by Karen Margolis
Publisher Columbia University Press, New York, 2012
ISBN 0231158718, 9780231158718
107 pages

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Gary Peters: The Philosophy of Improvisation (2009)

Improvisation is usually either lionized as an ecstatic experience of being in the moment or disparaged as the thoughtless recycling of clichés. Eschewing both of these orthodoxies, The Philosophy of Improvisation ranges across the arts—from music to theater, dance to comedy—and considers the improvised dimension of philosophy itself in order to elaborate an innovative concept of improvisation.

Gary Peters turns to many of the major thinkers within continental philosophy—including Heidegger, Nietzsche, Adorno, Kant, Benjamin, and Deleuze—offering readings of their reflections on improvisation and exploring improvisational elements within their thinking. Peters’s wry, humorous style offers an antidote to the frequently overheated celebration of freedom and community that characterizes most writing on the subject. Expanding the field of what counts as improvisation, The Philosophy of Improvisation will be welcomed by anyone striving to comprehend the creative process.

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2009
ISBN 0226662780, 9780226662787
198 pages

review (Andy Hamilton, The Wire)
review (Martin Lussier, Critical Studies in Improvisation)

publisher
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Hubert L. Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow: Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1982/1987) [English/German]

This book, which Foucault himself has judged accurate, is the first to provide a sustained, coherent analysis of Foucault’s work as a whole.

To demonstrate the sense in which Foucault’s work is beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, the authors unfold a careful, analytical exposition of his oeuvre. They argue that during the of Foucault’s work became a sustained and largely successful effort to develop a new method—”interpretative analytics”—capable fo explaining both the logic of structuralism’s claim to be an objective science and the apparent validity of the hermeneutical counterclaim that the human sciences can proceed only by understanding the deepest meaning of the subject and his tradition.

Originally published in 1982
Second Edition With an Afterword by and an Interview with Michel Foucault
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1983
ISBN 0226163121, 9780226163123
256 pages

German edition: Michel Foucault: Zwischen Strukturalismus und Hermeneutik
Originally published by Athenäum Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1987
Second edition
Publisher Beltz Athenäum Verlag, Weinheim, 1994
ISBN 3895470503
327 pages

review (Peter Kemp, History and Theory)
review (Tracy B. Strong, Political Theory)
review (Dominick Lacapra, The American Historical Review)
review (David Hoy, London Review of Books)
review (Michael Donnelly, American Journal of Sociology)
review (Ian Hacking, The Journal of Philosophy)
review (Mary Maynard, The British Journal of Sociology)
review (Randall McGowen, Comparative Literature)
review (Mark Seltzer, Diacritics)

publisher
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