Roman Jakobson: Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (1976/1978)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, language, linguistics, meaning, semiotics, sound recording
As Lévi-Strauss writes: “These innovatory ideas, towards which I was no doubt drawn by my own thought but as yet with neither the boldness nor the conceptual tools necessary to organize them properly, were all the more convincing in that Jakobson’s exposition of them was performed with that incomparable art which made him the most dazzling teacher and lecturer that I had ever been lucky enough to hear.”
This book is marked by Jakobson’s elegance and demonstrative powers. Jakobson never pursues abstract and sometimes difficult course of his argument without illuminating it by examples from a great variety of languages and from the arts.
Originally published in France by Les Editions de Minuit, 1976
Translated by John Mepham
Preface by Claude-Lévi Strauss
Publisher The MIT Press, 1978
ISBN 0262100193
116 pages
Umberto Eco: The Open Work (1962/1989)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, art, art theory, literary criticism, poetry, semiotics
More than twenty years after its original appearance in Italian, The Open Work remains significant for its powerful concept of “openness”–the artist’s decision to leave arrangements of some constituents of a work to the public or to chance–and for its striking anticipation of two major themes of contemporary literary theory: the element of multiplicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interactive process between reader and text. The questions Umberto Eco raises, and the answers he suggests, are intertwined in the continuing debate on literature, art, and culture in general.
This entirely new edition, edited for the English-language audience with the approval of Eco himself, includes an authoritative introduction by David Robey that explores Eco’s thought at the period of The Open Work, prior to his absorption in semiotics. The book now contains key essays on Eco’s mentor Luigi Pareyson, on television and mass culture, and on the politics of art. Harvard University Press will publish separately and simultaneously the extended study of James Joyce that was originally part of The Open Work, entitled The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce. The Open Work explores a set of issues in aesthetics that remain central to critical theory, and does so in a characteristically vivid style. Eco’s convincing manner of presenting ideas and his instinct for the lively example are threaded compellingly throughout. This book is at once a major treatise in modern aesthetics and an excellent introduction to Eco’s thought.
Originally published as Opera aperta, 1962
Translated by Anna Cancogni
With an Introduction by David Robey
Publisher Harvard University Press, 1989
ISBN 0674639766, 9780674639768
285 pages
Jean-François Lyotard: Libidinal Economy (1974/1993)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, desire, economics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, semiotics, sex
Libidinal Economy, a major work of modern Continental philosophy in its own right, is regarded as the most important response to Deleuze and Guattari’s groundbreaking work. Having broken from Marxism, Lyotard presents an almost nihilistic attack on the philosophies of desire in a polemical and compelling work.
This philosophical development of the Freudian concept of ‘libidinal economy’ is in part a response to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, it can also be seen as culminating a line of modern thought ranging from de Sade, Nietzsche and Bataille, to Deleuze, Klossowski, Irigaray and Cixous.
First published as Economie Libidinale, Les Editions De Minuit, Paris, 1974
Translated and with Introduction by Ian Hamilton Grant
Publisher Indiana University Press, 1993
ISBN 0253207282, 9780253207289
275 pages
Timothy Lenoir (ed.): Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (1998)
Filed under book | Tags: · cartography, communication, germany, history of science, information, materiality, photography, science, semiotics, technology
Early practitioners of the social studies of science turned their attention away from questions of institutionalization, which had tended to emphasize macrolevel explanations, and attended instead to microstudies of laboratory practice. Though sympathetic to this approach—as the microstudies included in this book attest—the author is interested in re-investigating certain aspects of institution formation, notably the formation of scientific, medical, and engineering disciplines. He emphasizes the manner in which science as cultural practice is imbricated with other forms of social, political, and even aesthetic practices.
This book offers case studies that reexamine certain critical junctures in the traditional historical picture of the evolution of the role of the scientist in modern Western society. It focuses especially on the establishment of new disciplines within German research universities in the nineteenth century, the problematic relationship that emerged between science, industry, and the state at the turn of the twentieth century, and post-World War II developments in science and technology.
After an Introduction and two chapters dealing with science and technology as cultural production and the struggles of disciplines to achieve legitimation and authority, the author considers the following topics: the organic physics of 1847; the innovative research program of Carl Ludwig as a model for institutionalizing science-based medicine; optics, painting, and ideology in Germany, 1845-95; Paul Ehrlich’s “magic bullet”; the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia; and the introduction of nuclear magnetic resonance instrumentation into the practice of organic chemistry.
Publisher Stanford University Press, 1998
Writing Science series
ISBN 0804727775, 9780804727778
476 pages
Gerald Emanuel Stearn (ed.): McLuhan: Hot & Cool: A Primer for the Understanding of & a Critical Symposium with a Rebuttal by McLuhan (1967)
Filed under book | Tags: · global village, information, literacy, mass media, media theory, photography, print, radio, semiotics, speech, technology, television, text, writing
“A brilliant amalgam of articles, discussions, essays and interviews with and about the Pop Oracle himself, The Complete McLuhan: the most controversial thinker of the electronic age.” (from the back cover)
With essays by Howard Luck Gossage, Tom Wolfe, John Culkin, SJ., Dean Walker, Kenneth E. Boulding, George P. Elliott, Rudolph E. Morris, Walter Ong, SJ., Ammunition (C.I.O.), William Blissett, Harley Parker, Robert Shafer, John Freund, Patrick D. Hazard, Dell Hymes, Frank Kermode, A. Alvarez, Dan M. Davin, Raymond Williams, Harold Rosenberg, Dwight Macdonald, Christopher Ricks, Jack Behar, Ben Lieberman, John M. Johansen, George Steiner, Jonathan Miller, Andrew Forge, Benjamin DeMott, Susan Sontag; responses by Marshall McLuhan; and an interview by Gerald E. Stearn with McLuhan.
Publisher The Dial Press, New York, 1967
Signet Non-Fiction series, Q3739
312 pages
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Comment (1)Brian Massumi (ed.): A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (2002)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, art theory, body without organs, deterritorialization, immanence, philosophy, semiotics
A Shock to Thought brings together essays that explore Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of expression in a number of contemporary contexts. It will be of interest to all those in philosophy, cultural studies and art theory. The volume also contains an interview with Guattari which clearly restates the ‘aesthetic paradigm’ that organizes both his and Deleuze’s work.
With contributions by Melissa McMahon, Steven Shaviro, Stephen Zagala, Gary Genosko, Alan Bourassa, Michael Hardt, Catherine Dale, Paul Brains, Jose Gil, Mani Haghighi, Thomas Lamarre, Aden Evens, Andrew Murphie, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger
Publisher Routledge, 2002
ISBN 041523803X, 9780415238038
256 pages
Marshall McLuhan, Eric McLuhan: Laws of Media: The New Science (1988)
Filed under book | Tags: · mass media, media theory, semiotics, synecdoche, tetrad
Marshall McLuhan has been described as Canada’s most exciting and original thinker, a member of the small company of intellectual geniuses this country has produced. Works such as The Gutenberg Galaxy, The Mechanical Bride, From Cliche to Archetype, and Understanding Media have established his reputation throughout the world and have profoundly influenced our understanding of contemporary communication. In his later years McLuhan was working on a ‘unified field’ theory of human culture, an effort in which he collaborated with and was assisted by his son, Eric McLuhan. This book is the result of that collaboration.
The McLuhans are retrieving another way of understanding our world, a way known to some ancient Greeks (but not Aristotle), to medieval thinkers, to Francis Bacon and Giambattista Vico, and to T.S. Eliot and James Joyce in this century. It is based on the use of words and the conseuqent power of the ‘logos’ to shape all the elements of culture – media – with which we surround ourselves.
The authors explain how the invention of the alphabet led to the dominance of visual-space conceptualizations over those of acoustic space and its creative words (and word-plays). They consider the differences between the left- and right-hand sides of our brains, and use Gestalt theories of figure and ground to explore the underlying principles that define media.
‘Media,’ the word so closely connected with Marshall McLuhan’s thought, is here explored in its broadest meaning, encompassing all that has been created by humans: artefacts, information, ideas – every example of human innovation, from computer program to a tea cup, from musical arrangement to the formula for a cold remedy, from an X-ray machine to the sentence you’re reading right now. All these are media to whcih can be applied the laws the McLuhans have developed.
The laws are based on a set of four questions – a tetrad – that can be applied to any artefact or idea:
What does it enhance or intensify?
What does it render obsolete or displace?
What does it retrieve that was previoulsy obsolesced?
What does it produce or become when pressed to an extreme?
Inherent in every human innovation is an answer to each of the questions of this tetrad; anything that does not contain answers to these four questions is not the product of human creation.
The laws identified by the McLuhans consitute a new scientific basis for media studies, testable, and able to allow for prediction. It takes in all human activities and speech; it breaks down barriers and reconsiders them as mere intervals. In the McLuhan tradition, this New Science offers a while new understanding of human creation, and a vision that could reshape our future.
Publisher University of Toronto Press, 1988
ISBN 0802057829, 9780802057822
252 pages
