François Laruelle: Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics (2012)

Twenty years after cultivating a new orientation for aesthetics via the concept of non-photography, François Laruelle returns, having further developed his notion of a non-standard aesthetics. Published for the first time in a bilingual edition, Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics expounds on Laruelle’s current explorations into a photographic thinking as an alternative to the worn-out notions of aesthetics based on an assumed domination of philosophy over art. He proposes a new philosophical photo-fictional apparatus, or philo-fiction, that strives for a discursive mimesis of the photographic apparatus and the flash of the Real entailed in its process of image making. “A bit like if an artisan, to use a Socratic example, instead of making a camera based off of diagrams found in manuals, on the contrary had as his or her project the designing of a completely new apparatus of philo-fiction, thus capable of producing not simply photos, but photo-fictions.” One must enter into a space for seeing the vectorial and the imaginary number. Laruelle’s philo-fictions become not art installations, but “theoretical installations” calling for the consideration of the possibility of a non-standard aesthetics being of an equal or superior power to art and philosophy, an aesthetics in-the-last-instance that is itself an inventive and creative act of the most contemporary kind.

Translated by Drew S. Burk
Publisher Univocal Publishing, Minneapolis, 2012
ISBN 1937561119, 9781937561116
85 pages

publisher

PDF (English only)

Alexander R. Galloway: The Interface Effect (2012)

“Interfaces are back, or perhaps they never left. The familiar Socratic conceit from the Phaedrus, of communication as the process of writing directly on the soul of the other, has returned to center stage in today’s discussions of culture and media. Indeed Western thought has long construed media as a grand choice between two kinds of interfaces. Following the optimistic path, media seamlessly interface self and other in a transparent and immediate connection. But, following the pessimistic path, media are the obstacles to direct communion, disintegrating self and other into misunderstanding and contradiction. In other words, media interfaces are either clear or complicated, either beautiful or deceptive, either already known or endlessly interpretable.

Recognizing the limits of either path, Galloway charts an alternative course by considering the interface as an autonomous zone of aesthetic activity, guided by its own logic and its own ends: the interface effect. Rather than praising user-friendly interfaces that work well, or castigating those that work poorly, this book considers the unworkable nature of all interfaces, from windows and doors to screens and keyboards. Considered allegorically, such thresholds do not so much tell the story of their own operations but beckon outward into the realm of social and political life, and in so doing ask a question to which the political interpretation of interfaces is the only coherent answer.

Grounded in philosophy and cultural theory and driven by close readings of video games, software, television, painting, and other images, Galloway seeks to explain the logic of digital culture through an analysis of its most emblematic and ubiquitous manifestation – the interface.”

Publisher Polity, 2012
ISBN 0745662528, 9780745662527
170 pages

Review: McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar, 2015).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2021-12-16)

Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Uppinder Mehan (eds.): Terror, Theory and the Humanities (2012)

The events of September 11, 2001, have had a strong impact on theory and the humanities. They call for a new philosophy, as the old philosophy is inadequate to account for them. They also call for reflection on theory, philosophy, and the humanities in general. While the recent location and killing of Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, in Pakistan on May 2, 2011—almost ten years after he and his confederates carried out the 9/11 attacks—may have ended the “war on terror,” it has not ended the journey to understand what it means to be a theorist in the age of phobos nor the effort to create a new philosophy that measures up with life in the new millennium. It is in the spirit of hope—the hope that theory will help us to understand the age of terror—that the essays in this collection are presented.

With essays by Christian Moraru, Terry Caesar, David B. Downing, Horace L. Fairlamb, Emory Elliott, Elaine Martin, Robin Truth Goodman, Sophia A. McClennen, William V. Spanos, Zahi Zalloua.

Publisher Open Humanities Press, an imprint of MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor
Critical Climate Change series
Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License
ISBN 1607852497, 9781607852490
248 pages

publisher

PDF
View online (HTML)