Language Parasites: Of Phorontology

Language Parasites: Of Phorontology PDF Author: Sean Braune
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 0998531863
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
"What we call "Being" infects us and speaks through us - it treats us as a host to a linguistic and experiential parasite. Ontology - the study of Being - has primarily dealt with human questions regarding Being at the expense of the non-human, inhuman, and posthuman. Language Parasites works against this tendency by offering a "phorontology": a theory of Being inspired by "phoronts," which are tiny organisms that engage in parasitic migration (lice, mites, ticks, fleas, etc.). What is the Being of a parasite and how can that complicated non-human ontology influence human definitions of Being? Gradually, the anthropocentric distinction of subject and object fades away in favor of the emergence of a strange new philosophical entity called the transject, a being that is thrown far afield from the more normative notions of the subject that can be found in Hegel, Kant, Lacan, or even Foucault, Nietzsche, and Deleuze. A 'pataphysical excursion into the intricate world of philosophical ontology, Language Parasites presents the initial discoveries of a much larger project that seeks to redefine the boundaries of Being. This book is the result of a parasitic infection of continental philosophy in which the various parasites of German and French philosophy all meet at one locale for one express purpose: to eat together, feed together, and think together."--Back cover.

Language Parasites: Of Phorontology

Language Parasites: Of Phorontology PDF Author: Sean Braune
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 0998531863
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 138

Get Book Here

Book Description
"What we call "Being" infects us and speaks through us - it treats us as a host to a linguistic and experiential parasite. Ontology - the study of Being - has primarily dealt with human questions regarding Being at the expense of the non-human, inhuman, and posthuman. Language Parasites works against this tendency by offering a "phorontology": a theory of Being inspired by "phoronts," which are tiny organisms that engage in parasitic migration (lice, mites, ticks, fleas, etc.). What is the Being of a parasite and how can that complicated non-human ontology influence human definitions of Being? Gradually, the anthropocentric distinction of subject and object fades away in favor of the emergence of a strange new philosophical entity called the transject, a being that is thrown far afield from the more normative notions of the subject that can be found in Hegel, Kant, Lacan, or even Foucault, Nietzsche, and Deleuze. A 'pataphysical excursion into the intricate world of philosophical ontology, Language Parasites presents the initial discoveries of a much larger project that seeks to redefine the boundaries of Being. This book is the result of a parasitic infection of continental philosophy in which the various parasites of German and French philosophy all meet at one locale for one express purpose: to eat together, feed together, and think together."--Back cover.

Language Parasites: Of Phorontology

Language Parasites: Of Phorontology PDF Author: Sean Braune
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
Who speaks when you speak? Who writes when you write? Is it “you”--is it the “I” that you think you are? Or are we the chance inheritors of an invasive, exterior parasite--a parasite that calls itself “Being” or “Language?” If our sense of self is best defined on the basis of an exterior, parasitical force that enters us from the outside, then the “self” is no longer a centralized or agential “inside,” but rather becomes reconfigured as the result of an “outside” that parasitizes the “inside”-as-host. Rough versions of this model can be found in several traditions of continental philosophy: in Lacan, Derrida, Serres, Kristeva, Foucault, Baudrillard, to name a few. However, the full implications of this ontological model have yet to be addressed: what are its consequences for a theory of subjects, objects, and the agencies that intersect with them? How does this framework alter our understandings of the human and the non-human, the vital and the material? An off-kilter point of view is required to consider this historical and philosophical situation. Language Parasites argues that the best way to conceive of the “self” or “subject” as something linguistically and ontologically constituted by an aggressive and parasitical outside is by asking the following question: “what is the being of a parasite?” In addressing this challenge, Braune combines speculative philosophy with 'Pataphysics (the absurdist science, invented by Alfred Jarry, that theorizes a physics beyond both the para and the meta, resulting in the pata). These theoretical collisions betray a variety of swerves that extend to the social (as a parasite semiotics), the cultural (as the invasive force of memes), the aesthetic (as the transition of postmodernism to postmortemism), the linguistic (as found in Saussure's paranoid researches into the paragram), the poetic (as seen in Christopher Dewdney's journey into “Parasite Maintenance” and Christian Bök's attempts to embed a poem in a bacterium), and the literary (as para-cited in Henry Miller's experience of housing a parasite named “Conrad Moricand”). The “voice” of the parasite can be found in what Saussure calls the “paragram”--the uncanny messages that lurk hidden underneath the written word. And what does the parasite say? Or, does its speech reject human ears?

Parasite: A Philosophical Exploration

Parasite: A Philosophical Exploration PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004521518
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Parasite presents the ethico-biological problem of parasitism in a metaphorical and artistic fashion. In this book, philosophers explore the film using sources such as the ancient satirist Lucian’s De Parasito, Nietzsche’s “the vengeance of the weak,” Dostoyevsky’s “Underground,” or Marxism, among others.

Pataphilology

Pataphilology PDF Author: Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1947447815
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
What do the bizzare etymologies of Jean-Pierre Brisset, made-up languages for literary fiction, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Latin grammarians, Horace's Epodes, and the Papyrus of Ani have in common? Nothing! Taken together they provide an unusually coherent picture of a hitherto unacknowledged non-tradition of linguistic investigation. If pataphysics is the science of the singular, the unparallelled, the exception that has no rule, pataphilology is what gets it there, the singularity of singularities. It is the mode in which exceptions become exceptional, itself an unrepeatable intervention in the language. - Back cover.

Archive Feelings

Archive Feelings PDF Author: Mario Telò
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814257739
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Using classic Greek texts and modern theory, Telò forges a new model of tragic aesthetics.

Mythomanias

Mythomanias PDF Author: Lab M4
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 0692523553
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 59

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Book Description
"Come along ... come, a little closer ... ladyboys, rats, Brahmans, incestuous brothers, arrogant scientists, royal jesters, suicidal late-weaned adolescents, Diogenes-style rebels, obsessional mythical creatures, repressed psychoanalysts, overfed baby boys ... Indulge in a journey of contiguity, ambiguity, taboo and uncertainty, liberated perversities, an overload of emotional entanglements, little personal disasters, and ego-diseases ... Here is where psychotic machines, apparatuses and fragments, bodies in verse, and bodies-becoming are meeting in the story-assemblage of their solitary symptoms." mythomaniaS is a catalog of case studies in the form of film stills, architectural fragments, stage props, texts, and images culled from the experiments of MindMachineMakingMyths (Lab M4, part of the New Territories architecture studio, Bankgok, Thailand), a collaboration begun in 2012 between Camille Lacadee and François Roche to construct environmental-architectural psycho-scapes as laboratory-shelters for exploring and deconstructing the supposed rifts between realism and speculative fiction (myth), psyche and environment, body and mind. Bringing together architecture, Deleuze and Guatarri's schizoanalysis and deterritorialization, and Alfred Jarry's pataphysics (the "science of imaginary solutions which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments"), Lacadee and Roche (and their tribe, Ezio Blasetti, Stephan Henrich, Danielle Willems, Gwyll Jahn, and many others) enacted and filmed mise-en-abymes in which certain scripted para-psychic narratives and architectural structures merge in the pursuit of reclaiming resilience - described by Roche as a tactic for merging refusal and vitality into a schizophrenic logic able to navigate the antagonism between the bottom-up and top-down conditions of the globalized world. In these fabricated schizoid psycho-nature-machine-scapes, the human being is no longer a bio-ecological consumer but a psycho-computing animal that emerges co-dependently with its environment in a hyper-local haecceity ("this-ness"). In the vein of Situationist psychogeography ("the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals"), each scenario fabulates geo-architectural conditions of human exile, solitude, and pathology drawn from narratives of the forbidden and taboo: the true story of an old Indian book collector exiled from his community on the suspicion of atheism, who finds refuge in a tear-collecting shelter ("Would Have Been My Last Complaint"); a scientist captured by a water spirit who remains trapped like a fish in the mindscape of a fish butcher (Although (in) Hapnea); a monster-boy endomorph constantly overfed and protected by a claustrophilic antidote-jacket produced by the excess of his incestuous mother's love ((beau)strosity); Ariadne, labyrinth overseer, floating between two macho spirals, testosteroned Theseus and alcoholic Dionysus (Naxos, Terra Insola); the feral child - innocent, naïve, and obscene - in the deep jungle, auscultated by a scientistic voyeurism (The Offspring); etc. Each of these scenarios (designed as "shelters" where mind, environment, and architecture co-map each other) unfolds a "mythomania" in which each character transforms, and is transformed, para-psychically, by the environment, in a sort of biotope (habitat) feedback experiment. Ultimately, Lacadee and Roche want to create - via architecture and design, myth (literature), and psycho-geography - various conditions for schizoid passages between realism and fiction, expertise and knowledge, mind and built environment, narrative and topology, in order to bring about new strategic-tragic co-dependencies as forms of schizoid resistance to the usual identity regimes, and to also reboot architecture as a form of psycho-social praxis and non-necrotic speculati

Noise Thinks the Anthropocene

Noise Thinks the Anthropocene PDF Author: Aaron Zwintscher
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1950192059
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
In an increasingly technologized and connected world, it seems as if noise must be increasing. Noise, however, is a complicated term with a complicated history. Noise can be traced through structures of power, theories of knowledge, communication, and scientific practice, as well as through questions of art, sound, and music. Thus, rather than assume that it must be increasing, this work has focused on better understanding the various ways that noise is defined, what that noise can do, and how we can use noise as a strategically political tactic. Noise Thinks the Anthropocene is a textual experiment in noise poetics that uses the growing body of research into noise as source material. It is an experiment in that it results from indeterminate means, alternative grammar, and experimental thinking. The outcome was not predetermined. It uses noise to explain, elucidate, and evoke (akin to other poetic forms) within the textual milieu in a manner that seeks to be less determinate and more improvisational than conventional writing. Noise Thinks the Anthropocene argues that noise poetics is a necessary form for addressing political inequality, coexistence with the (nonhuman) other, the ecological crisis, and sustainability because it approaches these issues as a system of interconnected fragments and excesses and thus has the potential to reach or envision solutions in novel ways.

Aesthetic Animism

Aesthetic Animism PDF Author: David Jhave Johnston
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262034514
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
A poetics appropriate to the digital era that connects digital poetry to traditional poetry's concerns with being. This book offers a decoder for some of the new forms of poetry enabled by digital technology. Examining many of the strange technological vectors converging on language, it proposes a poetics appropriate to the digital era while connecting digital poetry to traditional poetry's concerns with being (a.k.a. ontological implications). Digital poetry, in this context, is not simply a descendent of the book. Digital poems are not necessarily “poems” or written by “poets”; they are found in ads, conceptual art, interactive displays, performative projects, games, or apps. Poetic tools include algorithms, browsers, social media, and data. Code blossoms into poetic objects and poetic proto-organisms. Introducing the terms TAVs (Textual-Audio-Visuals) and TAVITS (Textual-Audio-Visual-Interactive), Aesthetic Animism theorizes a relation between scientific method and literary analysis; considers the temporal implications of animation software; and links software studies to creative writing. Above all it introduces many examples of digital poetry within a playful yet considered flexible taxonomy. In the future imagined here, digital poets program, sculpt, and nourish immense immersive interfaces of semi-autonomous word ecosystems. Poetry, enhanced by code and animated by sensors, reengages themes active at the origin of poetry: animism, agency, consciousness. Digital poetry will be perceived as living, because it is living.

The Turbulence of Migration

The Turbulence of Migration PDF Author: Nikos Papastergiadis
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745668135
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
This important book traces the impact of the movement of people, ideas and capital across the globe.

Helicography

Helicography PDF Author: Craig Dworkin
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1953035647
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Part art history essay, part experimental fiction, part theoretical manifesto on the politics of equivalence, Helicography examines questions of scale in relation to Robert Smithson's iconic 1970 artwork Spiral Jetty. In an essay and film made to accompany the earthwork, Smithson invites us to imagine the stone helix of his structure at various orders of magnitude, from microscopic molecules to entire galaxies. Taking up this invitation with an unrelenting and literal enthusiasm, Helicography pursues the implications of such transformations all the way to the limits of logic. If other spirals, from the natural to the man-made, were expanded or condensed to the size of Spiral Jetty, what are the consequences of their physical metamorphoses? What other equivalences follow in turn, and where do their surprising historical, cultural, and mechanical connections lead? This book considers a number of forms in order to find out: the fluid vortices of whirlpools, hurricanes, and galaxies; the delicate shells of snails and the threatening pose of rattlesnakes; prehistoric ferns and the turns of the inner ear; the monstrous jaws of ancient sharks; a baroque finial scroll on a bass viol; a 19th-century watch spring; phonograph discs and spooled film; the largest open-pit mine on the planet. The result is a narrative laboratory for the "science of imaginary solutions" proposed by Alfred Jarry (whose King Ubu also plays a central role in the story told here), a work of fictocriticism blurring form and content, and the story of a single instant in time lost in the deserts of the intermountain west. Craig Dworkin is the author of four scholarly monographs - Reading the Illegible (Northwestern University Press), No Medium (MIT Press), Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography (Fordham University Press), and Radium of the Word: a Poetics of Materiality (Chicago University Press) - as well as a half-dozen edited collections and a dozen books of experimental writing, including, most recently, The Pine-Woods Notebook (Kenning Editions). He teaches literary history and theory at the University of Utah.