Look at the Bunny
Look at the Bunny

Author: Dominic Pettman

Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Published: 2013-03-29

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1780991401

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Are totems merely a thing of the distant past? Or might it be that our sleek new machines are producing totemic forces which we are only beginning to recognize? This book asks to what degree today's media technologies are haunted by a Freudian ghost, functioning as totems or taboos (or both). By isolating five case-studies (rabbits in popular culture, animated creatures that go "off-program," virtual lovers, jealous animal spirit guides, and electronic paradises), Look at the Bunny highlights and explores today's techno-totemic environment. In doing so, it explores how nonhuman avatars are increasingly expected to shepherd us beyond our land-locked identities, into a risky - sometimes ecstatic - relationship with the Other. ,

Spectacular Posthumanism
Spectacular Posthumanism

Author: Drew Ayers

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-04-18

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1501340107

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Spectacular Posthumanism examines the ways in which VFX imagery fantasizes about digital disembodiment while simultaneously reasserting the importance of the lived body. Analyzing a wide range of case studies-including the films of David Cronenberg and Stanley Kubrick, image technologies such as performance capture and crowd simulation, Game of Thrones, Terminator: Genisys, Planet Earth, and 300-Ayers builds on Miriam Hansen's concept of “vernacular modernism” to argue that the “vernacular posthumanism” of these media objects has a phenomenological impact on viewers. As classical Hollywood cinema initiated viewers into the experience of modernism, so too does the VFX image initiate viewers into digital, posthuman modes of thinking and being. Ayers's innovative close-reading of popular, mass-market media objects reveals the complex ways that these popular media struggle to make sense of humanity's place within the contemporary world. Spectacular Posthumanism argues that special and visual effects images produce a digital, posthuman vernacular, one which generates competing fantasies about the utopian and dystopian potential of a nonhuman future. As humanity grapples with such heady issues as catastrophic climate change, threats of anonymous cyber warfare, an increasing reliance on autonomous computing systems, genetic manipulation of both humans and nonhumans, and the promise of technologically enhanced bodies, the anxieties related to these issues register in popular culture. Through the process of compositing humans and nonhumans into a seemingly seamless whole, digital images visualize a utopian fantasy in which flesh and information might easily coexist and cohabitate with each other. These images, however, also exhibit the dystopic anxieties that develop around this fantasy. Relevant to our contemporary moment, Spectacular Posthumanism both diagnoses and offers a critique of this fantasy, arguing that this posthuman imagination overlooks the importance of embodiment and lived experience.

Escape Philosophy
Escape Philosophy

Author: Roy Christopher

Publisher: punctum books

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 168571062X

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The physical body has often been seen as a prison, as something to be escaped by any means necessary: technology, mechanization, drugs and sensory deprivation, alien abduction, Rapture, or even death and extinction. Taking in horror movies from David Cronenberg and UFO encounters, metal bands such as Godflesh, ketamine experiments, AI, and cybernetics, Escape Philosophy is an exploration of the ways that human beings have sought to make this escape, to transcend the limits of the human body, to find a way out. As the physical world continues to crumble at an ever-accelerating rate, and we are faced with a particularly 21st-century kind of dread and dehumanization in the face of climate collapse and a global pandemic, Escape Philosophy asks what this escape from our bodies might look like, and if it is even possible.

Derrida and Textual Animality
Derrida and Textual Animality

Author: Rodolfo Piskorski

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-09-24

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 3030517322

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Derrida and Textual Animality: For a Zoogrammatology of Literature analyses what has come to be known, in the Humanities, as ‘the question of the animal’, in relation to literary texts. Rodolfo Piskorski intervenes in the current debate regarding the non-human and its representation in literature, resisting popular materialist methodological approaches in the field by revisiting and revitalising the post-structuralist thought of Derrida and the ‘linguistic turn’. The book focuses on Derrida’s early work in order to frame deconstructive approaches to literature as necessary for a theory and practice of literary criticism that addresses the question of the animal, arguing that texts are like animals, and animals are like texts. While Derrida’s late writings have been embraced by animal studies scholars due to its overt focus on animality, ethics, and the non-human, Piskorski demonstrates the additional value of these early Derridean texts for the field of literary animal studies by proposing detailed zoogrammatological readings of texts by Freud, Clarice Lispector, Ted Hughes, and Darren Aronofsky, while in dialogue with thinkers such as Butler, Kristeva, Genette, Deleuze and Guattari, and Attridge.

Being Human
Being Human

Author: Ron Broglio

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-10-02

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1317610318

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Technology and animals often serve as the boundaries by which we define the human. In this issue contributors explore these categories as necessary supplements or as porous membranes which disturb the scaffolding of how the human is constructed. A lingering question throughout is whether we have ever been human or if such a category is a non-localizable ideal or perhaps a misnomer. In this collection of essays, internationally known theorists muddle the categorical boundaries such that animals and technologies become necessary components rather than limits for what it means to be human. They examine a range of subjects, including apophatic animality, critical media objects-to-think-with, biosemiotic insect resonances, the monstrous and horrific which dislodges our cultural animals, and the problem of thinking of animality as stupidity. Novels, films, digital objects, scientific laboratories, philosophical texts, animals on the road and in the fields serve as sites for inquiry. The result of these investigations is the spectral possibility that we are not the humans we make ourselves out to be. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television
The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television

Author: Michael Hauskeller

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-01-13

Total Pages: 743

ISBN-13: 113743032X

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What does popular culture's relationship with cyborgs, robots, vampires and zombies tell us about being human? Insightful scholarly perspectives shine a light on how film and television evince and portray the philosophical roots, the social ramifications and the future visions of a posthumanist world.

Infinite Distraction
Infinite Distraction

Author: Dominic Pettman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-05-27

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 1509502289

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It is often argued that contemporary media homogenize our thoughts and actions, without us being fully aware of the restrictions they impose. But what if the problem is not that we are all synchronized to the same motions or moments, but rather dispersed into countless different emotional micro-experiences? What if the effect of so-called social media is to calibrate the interactive spectacle so that we never fully feel the same way as other potential allies at the same time? While one person is fuming about economic injustice or climate change denial, another is giggling at a cute cat video. And, two hours late, vice versa. The nebulous indignation which constitutes the very fuel of true social change can be redirected safely around the network, avoiding any dangerous surges of radical activity. In this short and provocative book, Dominic Pettman examines the deliberate deployment of what he calls hypermodulation, as a key strategy encoded into the contemporary media environment. His account challenges the various narratives that portray social media as a sinister space of synchronized attention, in which we are busily clicking ourselves to death. This critical reflection on the unprecedented power of the Internet requires us to rethink the potential for infinite distraction that our latest technologies now allow.

Sonic Intimacy
Sonic Intimacy

Author: Dominic Pettman

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2017-03-21

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 150360148X

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“A perceptive, engaging, and clever set of meditations on . . . how sound produces human, technical, and nonhuman intimacies.” —Richard Grusin,University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Sonic Intimacy asks us who—or what—deserves to have a voice, beyond the human. Arguing that our ears are far too narrowly attuned to our own species, the book explores four different types of voices: the cybernetic, the gendered, the creaturely, and the ecological. Through both a conceptual framework and a series of case studies, Dominic Pettman tracks some of the ways in which these voices intersect and interact. He demonstrates how intimacy is forged through the ear, perhaps even more than through any other sense, mode, or medium. The voice, then, is what creates intimacy, both fleeting and lasting, not only between people, but also between animals, machines, and even natural elements: those presumed not to have a voice in the first place. Taken together, the manifold, material, actual voices of the world, whether primarily natural or technological, are a complex cacophony that is desperately trying to tell us something about the rapidly failing health of the planet and its inhabitants. As Pettman cautions, we would do well to listen. “Pettman is a very engaging writer, and the way he traverses contexts and theoretical horizons is thrilling.” —Naomi Waltham-Smith, Boundary 2 “With Sonic Intimacy, we are manifestly in the hands of a skilled and not a little playful writer who connects new media to long developed philosophical conversations.” —David Cecchetto, York University

Finance Fictions
Finance Fictions

Author: Arne De Boever

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2018-03-06

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0823279189

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Finance Fictions takes the measure of what it means to live in a world ruled by high finance by examining the tension between psychosis and realism that plays out in the contemporary finance novel. When the things traded at the center of the economy cease to be things at all, but highly abstracted speculations, how do we come to see the real? What sorts of narrative can accurately approach the actual workings of a neoliberal economy marked by accelerating cycles of market crashes, economic and political crisis, and austerity? Revisiting such twentieth-century classics of the genre as Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, De Boever argues that the twenty-first century is witnessing the birth of a new kind of realistic novel that can make sense of complex financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and digital algorithms operating at speeds faster than what human beings or computers can record. If in 1989 Wolfe could still urge novelists to work harder to “tame the billion-footed beast of reality,” today’s economic reality confronts us with a difference that is qualitative rather than quantitative: a new financial ontology requiring new modes of thinking and writing. Mobilizing the philosophical thought of Quentin Meillassoux in the close reading of finance novels by Robert Harris, Michel Houellebecq, Ben Lerner and less well-known works of conceptual writing such as Mathew Timmons’ Credit, Finance Fictions argues that realism is in for a speculative update if it wants to take on the contemporary economy—an “if” whose implications turn out to be deeply political. Part literary study and part philosophical inquiry, Finance Fictions seeks to contribute to a new mindset for creative and critical work on finance in the twenty-first century.

Cybermedia
Cybermedia

Author: Carol Vernallis

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 1501357069

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We're experiencing a time when digital technologies and advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and big data are redefining what it means to be human. How do these advancements affect contemporary media and music? This collection traces how media, with a focus on sound and image, engages with these new technologies. It bridges the gap between science and the humanities by pairing humanists' close readings of contemporary media with scientists' discussions of the science and math that inform them. This text includes contributions by established and emerging scholars performing across-the-aisle research on new technologies, exploring topics such as facial and gait recognition; EEG and audiovisual materials; surveillance; and sound and images in relation to questions of sexual identity, race, ethnicity, disability, and class and includes examples from a range of films and TV shows including Blade Runner, Black Mirror, Mr. Robot, Morgan, Ex Machina, and Westworld. Through a variety of critical, theoretical, proprioceptive, and speculative lenses, the collection facilitates interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration and provides readers with ways of responding to these new technologies.