Steven Shaviro: Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (2009)

“In Without Criteria, Steven Shaviro proposes and explores a philosophical fantasy: imagine a world in which Alfred North Whitehead takes the place of Martin Heidegger. What if Whitehead, instead of Heidegger, had set the agenda for postmodern thought? Heidegger asks, “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” Whitehead asks, “How is it that there is always something new?” In a world where everything from popular music to DNA is being sampled and recombined, argues Shaviro, Whitehead’s question is the truly urgent one. Without Criteria is Shaviro’s experiment in rethinking postmodern theory, especially the theory of aesthetics, from a point of view that hearkens back to Whitehead rather than Heidegger.

Shaviro does this largely by reading Whitehead in conjunction with Gilles Deleuze, finding important resonances and affinities between them, suggesting both a Deleuzian reading of Whitehead and a Whiteheadian reading of Deleuze. In working through the ideas of Whitehead and Deleuze, Shaviro also appeals to Kant, arguing that certain aspects of Kant’s thought pave the way for the philosophical “constructivism” embraced by both Whitehead and Deleuze.

Kant, Whitehead, and Deleuze are not commonly grouped together, but the juxtaposition of them in Without Criteria helps to shed light on a variety of issues that are of concern to contemporary art and media practices (especially developments in digital film and video), and to controversies in cultural theory (including questions about commodity fetishism and about immanence and transcendence). Moreover, in his rereading of Whitehead (and in deliberate contrast to the “ethical turn” in much recent theoretical discourse), Shaviro opens the possibility of a critical aesthetics of contemporary culture.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2009
Technologies of Lived Abstraction series
ISBN 0262195763, 9780262195768
192 pages

Reviews: Gregg Lambert (NDPR, 2009), Garin Dowd (Radical Philosophy, 2009), Vlastimil Zuska (Estetika, 2011), Barry Allen (Common Knowledge, 2011), Carolyn L. Kane (Deleuze Studies, 2013).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2015-3-8)

Johanna Drucker: SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (2009)

“Nearly a decade ago, Johanna Drucker cofounded the University of Virginia’s SpecLab, a digital humanities laboratory dedicated to risky projects with serious aims. In SpecLab she explores the implications of these radical efforts to use critical practices and aesthetic principles against the authority of technology based on analytic models of knowledge.

Inspired by the imaginative frontiers of graphic arts and experimental literature and the technical possibilities of computation and information management, the projects Drucker engages range from Subjective Meteorology to Artists’ Books Online to the as yet unrealized ’Patacritical Demon, an interactive tool for exposing the structures that underlie our interpretations of text. Illuminating the kind of future such experiments could enable, SpecLab functions as more than a set of case studies at the intersection of computers and humanistic inquiry. It also exemplifies Drucker’s contention that humanists must play a role in designing models of knowledge for the digital age—models that will determine how our culture will function in years to come.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2009
ISBN 0226165086, 9780226165080
264 pages

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PDF (updated on 2021-2-4)

Gayle Zachmann: Frameworks for Mallarmé: The Photo and the Graphic of an Interdisciplinary Aesthetic (2008)

Countering the conventional image of the deliberately obscure “ivory-tower poet,” Frameworks for Mallarmé presents Stéphane Mallarmé as a journalist and critic who was actively engaged with the sociocultural and technological shifts of his era. Gayle Zachmann introduces a writer whose aesthetic was profoundly shaped by contemporary innovations in print and visual culture, especially the nascent art of photography. She analyzes the preeminence of the visual in conjunction with Mallarmé’s quest for “scientific” language, and convincingly links the poet’s production to a nineteenth-century understanding of cognition that is articulated in terms of optical perception. The result is a distinctly modern recuperation of the Horatian doctrine of ut pictura poesis in Mallarmé’s poetry and his circumstantial writings.

Publisher SUNY Press, 2008
ISBN 079147593X, 9780791475935
209 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2013-5-31)