Moles, Baudrillard, Boudon, van Lier, Wahl, Morin: Les objets (1969/71) [French, Spanish]
Filed under book | Tags: · 1968, aesthetics, design, object, philosophy, political economy, psychology, semiotics, sociology, theory
Communications is a biannual social sciences journal founded by Georges Friedmann, Roland Barthes, and Edgar Morin. Soon after its start in 1961 it became a reference publication for media studies and semiotics in France and internationally.
Its first 1969 issue was dedicated to the theory of objects, positioning it “at the confluence of sociology, political economy, social psychology, marketing, philosophy, design and aesthetics” (p 141). At the same time the journal argued for the relevance of the study of objects for governmental institutions such as “the Ministry of Industrial Production, the Ministry of Transport, the customs authorities, the courts, the counterfeits studies, or the National Industrial Property Institute” (p 141).
It can be read as a post-May 1968 attempt to use the concept of object as an agent linking social sciences in order to increase their impact on direct political change, and as well as an early echo of what more than a decade later came to be known as the actor-network theory.
Two years later the magazine appeared in its Spanish translation in book form.
Communications 13
Publisher Centre d’études des communications de masse, École pratique des hautes études, and Seuil, Paris, 1969
139 pages
Les objets (French, 1969), View online
Los objetos (Spanish, trans. Silvia Delpy, 1971/1974)
Timothy Morton: Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · causality, magic, music, object, object-oriented ontology, ontology, phenomenology, philosophy, physics, sound
“In this book Timothy Morton, an ecologist, literary theorist, and object-oriented philosopher, lures us into a magical night of objects. If things are intrinsically withdrawn, irreducible to their perception or relations or uses, they can only affect each other in a strange region of traces and footprints: the aesthetic dimension. Every object sparkles with absence. Sensual things are elegies to the disappearance of objects. Doesn’t this tell us something about the aesthetic dimension, why philosophers have often found it to be a realm of evil?
Object-oriented ontology (OOO) offers a startlingly fresh way to think about causality that takes into account developments in physics since 1900. Causality, argues OOO, is aesthetic. Morton explores what it means to say that a thing has come into being, that it is persisting, and that it has ended. Drawing from examples in physics, biology, ecology, art, literature and music, he demonstrates the counterintuitive yet elegant explanatory power of OOO for thinking causality.”
Publisher Open Humanities Press, 2013
New Metaphysics series
Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 License
ISBN 9781607852025
228 pages
Review: Nathan Brown (Parrhesia, 2013).
Comment (0)Robert Sumrell, Kazys Varnelis: Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, city, new media, object, philosophy
AUDC’s first book captures three moments in modern culture that offer glimpses into our increasingly perverse relationship to architecture, cities, and objects. “Ether” explores the Los Angeles telecom hotel, One Wilshire; a 39 story building of utter banality and complete mystery. “The Stimulus Progression” examines the strange story of the Muzak Corporation and the invention of a culture of horizontality. “Quartzsite, Arizona” visits a desert town of 3,000 people that swells to over 1 million residents every summer when modern nomads in Recreational Vehicles descend upon in it in hordes. This book is a lively mix of philosophy, photography, architectural drawings and models, and new media.
Publisher Actar Editorial, 2007
ISBN 8496540537, 9788496540538
175 pages