Seminar participants intrigued by our series of sessions on Heidegger’s legacy might be interested in an upcoming lecture by Robert Yanal (Professor and Chair of WSU’s Philosophy Department) that addresses attempts to link Heidegger’s view of metaphysics and ethics with his political involvement with the Nazi Party. Full flyer for the event beneath the cut.
In lieu of the usual material, stay tuned to this post for an audio recording and/or transcript of our Q & A with Premediation author Richard Grusin.
Toward the end of Premediation, Grusin takes issue with Mark B. N. Hansen’s portrayal of the intersection of power/politics with media/technics. Download the entire essay (“Media Theory“) for the full story (WSU library log-in required).
I regret that the translation of Stiegler’s For a New Critique of Political Economy (published just last week) was not available in time for us to use it in replacement of Technics & Time, 2, because the former has a sharper focus on two traditions that we have very much been following this semester: Plato’s thoughts on the exteriorization of memory and Marx’s analysis of human labor. You, on the other hand, may regret it because this new text is more than 150 page shorter than T & T, 2. In any case, read more about it here and find out what might have been.
Chapter four of Premediation (“The Affective Life of Media”) opens with a discussion of philosopher Andy Clark’s fascinating study of the co-evolution of human and machine “intelligence,” Natural Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence. Click on the linked image after the jump to download a PDF of the entire text. Read the rest of this entry »
Seminar participants intrigued by last week’s discussion of what we might have to call (for lack of a better term) “post-subjective ethics” in relation to contemporary practices of (ditto the previous parenthetical) “immaterial consumption,” may be interested in “Brooklyn Without Limits,” the episode of NBC’s 30 Rock that aired for the first time the following evening (stream it here). In it, main character Liz Lemon finds a pair of jeans that both complement her posterior and her values (“hand-made in the USA” by a company that pays a living wage and does not harm the environment). But is it too good to be true? Watch and see!
Grusin’s study of “affectivity” under digital media follows and extend’s Benjamin’s earlier thinking about the ways that popular media forms reorient our sensory and affective capacities. Download Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” for the full backstory.
Seminar participants, particularly those working on projects at the intersection of digital media and affect/subjectivity and/or have already become intrigued by Grusin’s discussion of affect and media in Premediation, may be be interested in reading Jodi Dean’s recent MediaTropes article “Affective Networks.”
Seminar participants may be interested in attending an upcoming talk by Paul Bové, drawn from the research for his in-progress book, Henry Adams and the Creative Love of Imagination. Full flyer for the event after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
As Grusin mentions early in the text, Premediation is a sequel/prequel of sort to an earlier book written collaboration with Jay David Bolter, Remediation (2000). If you’re unfamiliar with that work and don’t have time to check it out in its entirety, you might read the 1996 essay of the same title (“Remediation“) that laid the groundwork for Bolter/Grusin’s theory of media progression (WSU library access required).
