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Showing 1 - 6 of 6 matches in All Departments
Always connect - that is the imperative of today's media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself - those messages that state: "There will be no more messages"? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of communication is integral to communication itself - instances they call excommunication. In three linked essays, Excommunication pursues this elusive topic by looking at mediation in the face of banishment, exclusion, and heresy, and by contemplating the possibilities of communication with the great beyond. First, Galloway proposes an original theory of mediation based on classical literature and philosophy, using Hermes, Iris, and the Furies to map out three of the most prevalent modes of mediation today-mediation as exchange, as illumination, and as network. Then, Thacker goes boldly beyond Galloway's classification scheme by examining the concept of excommunication through the secret link between the modern horror genre and medieval mysticism. Finally, Wark evokes the poetics of the infuriated swarm as a queer politics of heresy that deviates from both media theory and the traditional left. Reexamining commonplace definitions of media, mediation, and communication, Excommunication offers a glimpse into the realm of the nonhuman to find a theory of mediation adequate to our present condition.
Activists explore the possibility that a new practice of communism may emerge from the end of society as we know it. Society no longer exists, at least in the sense of a differentiated whole. There is only a tangle of norms and mechanisms through which THEY hold together the scattered tatters of the global biopolitical fabric, through which THEY prevent its violent disintegration. Empire is the administrator of this desolation, the supreme manager of a process of listless implosion.-from Introduction to Civil War Society is not in crisis, society is at an end. The things we used to take for granted have all been vaporized. Politics was one of these things, a Greek invention that condenses around an equation: to hold a position means to take sides, and to take sides means to unleash civil war. Civil war, position, sides-these were all one word in the Greek: stasis. If the history of the modern state in all its forms-absolute, liberal, welfare-has been the continuous attempt to ward off this stasis, the great novelty of contemporary imperial power is its embrace of civil war as a technique of governance and disorder as a means of maintaining control. Where the modern state was founded on the institution of the law and its constellation of divisions, exclusions, and repressions, imperial power has replaced them with a network of norms and apparatuses that conspire in the production of the biopolitical citizens of Empire. In their first book available in English, Tiqqun explores the possibility of a new practice of communism, finding a foundation for an ontology of the common in the politics of friendship and the free play of forms-of-life. They see the ruins of society as the ideal setting for the construction of the community to come. In other words: the situation is excellent. Now is not the time to lose courage.
"The Exploit" is that rare thing: a book with a clear grasp of how
networks operate that also understands the political implications
of this emerging form of power. It cuts through the nonsense about
how 'free' and 'democratic' networks supposedly are, and it offers
a rich analysis of how network protocols create a new kind of
control. Essential reading for all theorists, artists, activists,
techheads, and hackers of the Net." --McKenzie Wark, author of A
Hacker Manifesto"
Video games have been a central feature of the cultural landscape
for over twenty years and now rival older media like movies,
television, and music in popularity and cultural influence. Yet
there have been relatively few attempts to understand the video
game as an independent medium. Most such efforts focus on the
earliest generation of text-based adventures ("Zork, " for example)
and have little to say about such visually and conceptually
sophisticated games as "Final Fantasy X, Shenmue, Grand Theft Auto,
Halo, "and" The Sims, " in which players inhabit elaborately
detailed worlds and manipulate digital avatars with a vastOCoand in
some cases, almost unlimitedOCoarray of actions and choices.
In "Laruelle," Galloway argues that the digital is a
philosophical concept and not simply a technical one, employing a
detailed analysis of Laruelle to build this case while referencing
other thinkers in the French and Continental traditions, including
Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, and Immanuel Kant.
In order to explain clearly Laruelle's concepts such as the
philosophical decision and the principle of sufficient philosophy,
Galloway lays a broad foundation with his discussions of "the One"
as it has developed in continental philosophy, the standard model
of philosophy, and how philosophers view "the digital." Digital machines dominate today's world, while so-called digital thinking--that is, binary thinking such as presence and absence or self and world--is often synonymous with what it means to think at all. In examining Laruelle and digitality together, Galloway shows how Laruelle remains a profoundly non-digital thinker--perhaps the only non-digital thinker today--and engages in an extensive discussion on the interconnections between media, philosophy, and technology.
Always connect - that is the imperative of today's media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself - those messages that state: "There will be no more messages"? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of communication is integral to communication itself - instances they call excommunication. In three linked essays, Excommunication pursues this elusive topic by looking at mediation in the face of banishment, exclusion, and heresy, and by contemplating the possibilities of communication with the great beyond. First, Galloway proposes an original theory of mediation based on classical literature and philosophy, using Hermes, Iris, and the Furies to map out three of the most prevalent modes of mediation today-mediation as exchange, as illumination, and as network. Then, Thacker goes boldly beyond Galloway's classification scheme by examining the concept of excommunication through the secret link between the modern horror genre and medieval mysticism. Finally, Wark evokes the poetics of the infuriated swarm as a queer politics of heresy that deviates from both media theory and the traditional left. Reexamining commonplace definitions of media, mediation, and communication, Excommunication offers a glimpse into the realm of the nonhuman to find a theory of mediation adequate to our present condition.
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