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Paul Connerton - How Societies Remember
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Cambridge UP, 1989.
Connerton’s main question in this book is “how the memory of groups” is “conveyed and sustained”(1) which can be explained in the dimension of both political power and psychological mechanism. For him, collective memory of society (social memory) is organized and legitimated through two social activities: commemorative ceremonies… »
Laura U. Marks - The Skin of the Film
Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film, Duke UP, 2000.
If cinema is an audiovisual medium in nature, why does Laura Marks look for nonaudiovisual sense experience in cinema? Of course, the films and videos she tries to examine are not just the general cinemas but what she calls intercultural cinemas. Why does intercultural cinema… »
Jacques Rancière - The Politics of Aesthetics
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, Continuum, 2004.
For Rancière, aesthetics means “a specific regime for identifying and reflecting on the arts: a mode of articulation between ways of doing and making, their corresponding forms of visibility, and possible ways of thinking about their relationships”(10). It does not merely refer to… »
Paul Feyerabend - Against Method
Paul Feyerabend. Against Method. 3rd Ed. Verso, 1993.
This book is, as the title is saying plainly, challenging the idea that in science there is and has been a proper methodology for scientific research distinctive from non-science and pseudo-science. If only one methodology were allowed in science, we could not have had science as what we… »
Norbert Wiener - Cybernetics
Norbert Wiener. Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 2nd Ed. The MIT Press, 1965.
Cybernetics was the field of control and communication theory which laid groundwork for the computer culture now we live in. It was an integration of diverse sciences and disciplines asking how to design a model for the… »
Chris Hables Gray - Cyborg Citizen
Chris Hables Gray. Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age. Routledge, 2002.
Curiously, all the theories of posthumanism have been disappeared, and discourses of the postmodern have receded like a popular fad. As if there is not any longer a serious discussion on the virtual reality today, though we have just arrived the time we expected… »
Eugene Thacker - The Global Genome
Eugene Thacker. The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture. The MIT Press, 2005.
Although the main object of Thacker’s The Global Genome is biology (and body itself), the context in which he deals with the object throughout the book is more complex than simple investigation on scientific discipline (genomics) or biological matter (genome). Rather his context… »
How to Encounter That Impossibility? Zizek’s Theory of Subject
From Zizek’s reading of Hegel, Marx, and Lacan, can we learn about Zizek, not the complex entanglement of Hegelian, Marxian, and Lacanian theories? What is Zizek’s own theory, his own philosophical, political, and psychoanalytic theory? What does Zizek want to say to us, borrowing Lacan’s (or Marx’s and Hegel’s) voice – as if he is… »
W. J. T. Mitchell’s Iconology and Picture Theory
What is an image? What is picture? Rather, what is the relationship between image and idea, image and word, the visual and the verbal, or the visible and the sayable? What is the relation of pictures and language? Is the one superior to the other, or each of them belongs to the different realm? The… »
The Big Other Operating at a Symbolic Level
(Reading: Slavoj Zizek’s How to Read Lacan; http://www.lacan.com/zizhowto.html)
At the very moment when others see the death of psychoanalysis, Zizek witnesses instead the return of it. Thus the aim of this book (How to Read Lacan) is, according to him, “to demonstrate that it is only today that the time of psychoanalysis has come”(2). Zizek wants… »
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