Andreas Huyssen: After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, avant-garde, culture industry, fascism, high modernism, mass culture, modernism, pop art, postmodernism, poststructuralism
Huyssen argues that postmodernism cannot be regarded as a radical break with the past, as it is deeply indebted to that other trend within the culture of modernity—the historical avant-garde.
Publisher Indiana University Press, 1986
Theories of representation and difference
ISBN 0253203996, 9780253203991
244 pages
PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-7-18)
Comment (1)David Norman Rodowick: Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, digital culture, film theory, new media, philosophy, philosophy of history, postmodernism, poststructuralism, semiotics, utopia
In Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media D. N. Rodowick applies the concept of “the figural” to a variety of philosophical and aesthetic issues. Inspired by the aesthetic philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard, the figural defines a semiotic regime where the distinction between linguistic and plastic representation breaks down. This opposition, which has been the philosophical foundation of aesthetics since the eighteenth century, has been explicitly challenged by the new electronic, televisual, and digital media. Rodowick—one of the foremost film theorists writing today—contemplates this challenge, describing and critiquing the new regime of signs and new ways of thinking that such media have inaugurated.
To fully comprehend the emergence of the figural requires a genealogical critique of the aesthetic, Rodowick claims. Seeking allies in this effort to deconstruct the opposition of word and image and to create new concepts for comprehending the figural, he journeys through a range of philosophical writings: Thierry Kuntzel and Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier on film theory; Jacques Derrida on the deconstruction of the aesthetic; Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin on the historical image as a utopian force in photography and film; and Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault on the emergence of the figural as both a semiotic regime and a new stratagem of power coincident with the appearance of digital phenomena and of societies of control.
Scholars of philosophy, film theory, cultural criticism, new media, and art history will be interested in the original and sophisticated insights found in this book.
Publisher Duke University Press, 2001
Post-Contemporary Interventions series
ISBN 0822327228, 9780822327226
276 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-14)
Comment (1)William Chaloupka: Knowing Nukes. The Politics and Culture of the Atom (1992)
Filed under book | Tags: · hyperreality, nuclear weapons, postmodern, poststructuralism, robots, star wars
Countering critics who charge that postmodern positions on language, authority, and power cannot inform effective political responses, this compelling analysis employs these same methods to examine antinuclear politics. Star Wars (the movie and the antimissile system), the Freeze movement, Reaganism, and “lifestyle” politics all receive new treatments.
Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 1992
ISBN 0816620768, 9780816620760
Length 163 pages