Arts of Subjectivity: A New Animism for the Post-Media Era

Description

Bringing thinking from the arts and digital humanities into dialogue with one another, this book investigates what it means to be alive in a world that is structured by technology, the media, and an ever expanding sense of a global community. In this unique time in our history, when we are bombarded by signs and symbols and constantly connected into gadgets, apps, and networks, it has become increasingly difficult to navigate what has been dubbed a ‘post-truth’ world. Critiques taken from post-colonial studies and neoanimism help challenge the paranoia that has become endemic and, indeed, symptomatic to global realities we are now witnessing. This pertains not only to the ecological degradation of the planet but also to the lingering remnants of eurocentrism and racism that have taken the forms of nationalism and fascism. As a guide, an updated version of what Michel Foucault called an arts of existence may help us sail in these treacherous and confusing waters. Diving into post-structuralist French theory, through American feminism, and emerging out of media studies, this book argues for an ethical and aesthetic form of self-fashioning that runs counter to processes subjection and mediatization. This craft of life, as Plato called it, is a space of disjunction and liberation, between subjectivity and other, where something new and different has the potential to emerge and mould to our likeness. Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Dedication Contents Foreword Preface 1 A New Subjectivity Chapter Overviews An Animistic Revival 2 Iterations The Transcendent, Ideal, or Dialectic Subject The Postmodernist, Linguistic, or Psychoanalytic Subject The Immanent Subject 3 Metamodeling The Etymology of Mediogony Mediogony as Riddled Monstrosity The Symbiosis of Horror The Negativity of the Monstrous The Metaphorics of the Body Key Methodological Components 4 Cosmology Cosmopolitics in Neoanimism The Playfulness of the World as the Medio of the Subject and Object Relation The Chthulucene as Cosmological Landscape Reconciling the Society of the Spectacle with Neoanimism The Mechanosphere and Post-Mediatic Subjectivities 5 Linguistics Subjection, Subjectivation, and Glossematics Enunciative Pragmatics The Impact of Bakhtin Embodiment, Subjectivity, and the Carnival Minor Languages and Forms: Cant and Kitsch Marx’s Hieroglyph, Fetishism, or Riddling Subjectivity 6 Aesthetics Beginning with the Baroque and Subjectivity Histories of Aesthetic Ignorance and Aesthetic Integrationism Aestheticizing Subjectivity or Subjectivation Decolonial Thought and the Baroque Disavowal and Alethurgic Technics The Perversion of Détournement Schizoanalytic Black Holes and Performance Art Toward a Baroque Self-Fashioning From Allegory to Illusion and the Body 7 Subjectivity, Anew Précis Monstrosity, Transversality, Neoanimism The Conflagration of Paranoiac Semiologies A Wandering Star Notes 1 A New Subjectivity 2 Iterations 3 Metamodeling 4 Cosmology 5 Linguistics 6 Aesthetics 7 Subjectivity, Anew Bibliography Index