I am happy to announce that Ioana B. Juan’s Malicious Deceivers will be the third volume in the Sensing Media book series! See below for a description, and see here for more info or to pre-order!
In Malicious Deceivers, Ioana B. Jucan traces a genealogy of post-truth intimately tied to globalizing modernity and connects the production of repeatable fakeness with capitalism and Cartesian metaphysics. Through case studies that cross times and geographies, the book unpacks the notion of fakeness through the related logics of dissimulation (deception) and simulation (performativity) as seen with software/AI, television, plastics, and the internet. Specifically, Jucan shows how these (dis)simulation machines and performative objects construct impoverished pictures of the world, ensuring a repeatable sameness through processes of hollowing out embodied histories and lived experience.
Through both its methodology and its subjects-objects of study, the book further seeks ways to counter the abstracting mode of thinking and the processes of voiding performed by the twinning of Cartesian metaphysics and global capitalism. Enacting a model of creative scholarship rooted in the tradition of writing as performance, Jucan, a multimedia performance-maker and theatre director, uses the embodied “I” as a framing and situating device for the book and its sites of investigation. In this way, she aims to counter the Cartesian voiding of the thinking “I” and to enact a different kind of relationship between self and world from the one posited by Descartes and replayed in much Western philosophical and — more broadly — academic writing: a relationship of separation that situates the “I” on a pedestal of abstraction that voids it of its embodied histories and fails to account for its positionality within a socio-historical context and the operations of power that define it.
Ioana B. Jucan is Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Inquiry, Emerson College.
I am happy to announce that Vilém Flusser’s Communicology, edited and translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes and with a foreword by N. Katherine Hayles, will be published this December in the Sensing Media book series that I co-edit with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun for Stanford University Press!
There are already some great endorsements of the book:
“Flusser is a painter of oblique strokes, dismantling familiar perspectives. Never less than entertaining, Communicology refreshes, challenges and blasts open unexpected vistas.”
—Seán Cubitt, University of Melbourne
“If you are in search of Flusser the media theorist, indeed, if you are seeking to understand how information works, Communicology is it. Flusser teases out the kinds of fundamental questions that are at the core of the human experience.”
—Anke Finger, University of Connecticut
“Communicology is a central work for any appraisal of Flusser’s thinking, and an innovative and singular introduction to media theory.”
—Erick Felinto, State University of Rio de Janeiro
“Communicology is an important work for the study of media theory in general and, more specifically, Flusser’s own communication theory.”
—Rodrigo Petronio, Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation
To these I wanted to add a few more detailed notes, as series co-editor, on why this book, written in the late 1970s, might be of interest to readers today:
Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations is an important entry in the oeuvre of Vilém Flusser, the Czech-Brazilian thinker whose work has in recent years become an important point of reference in discussions within media theory, philosophy of technology, and posthumanism, among others. The significance of Communicology within this larger body of work is at least fourfold: 1) it is perhaps the clearest statement of Flusser’s theory of communication as involving a variably mediated relation between humans and the world, and hence an existential relation that has entered into a period of crisis with the transition from a textual-literary code to the media of “technical images” (such as photography, film, television, and digital imaging processes); 2) as the most systematic statement of this theory, which provocatively covers human communication from prehistoric to contemporary forms (from early uses of images to the rise of alphabetic writing to scientific and popular forms of technical media), the book provides essential context and background for more well-known but more narrowly focused works, such as Into the Universe of Technical Images (English translation published in 2011 with University of Minnesota Press); 3) it furthermore provides one of the most accessible entry points into Flusser’s work, and may thus also serve as a useful introduction for readers not yet familiar (and it should be emphasized that Flusser’s work, despite the increasing frequency with which he is cited, still remains only vaguely understood, in part because key works such as this one are not yet available in English); 4) finally, it offers a provocative view of a media situation that, while aimed at diagnosing and confronting political-communicational crises of the late 1970s (when it was composed), has uncanny resonances with our own “post-truth” era.
This is to say that Flusser’s Communicology is of interest for historical and theoretical reasons alike, and that it is capable of speaking to both specialized, academic readerships and broader, uninitiated audiences as well. As a historical document, it records an attempt to come to terms with changes happening in the moment—changes involving a massive and indeed global transformation of the technical infrastructures of mediated communication, which the author sees as the very infrastructures of perception and of thought. As such, the effort to think or take stock of these changes is radically precarious, without a stable foundation; notions of causality and truth are up for grabs, and with them the meaning not only of specific communications but of human existence itself. Flusser’s theory of communication is clearly informed by existentialism (an influence that peeks through in occasional references to Heidegger or Sartre, for example), but it is even more centrally informed by cybernetics and information theory: by the notion of feedback, for example, which is both exemplified in Flusser’s analyses of humans’ “programming” by the codes of traditional and technical media but which also, from a formal perspective, challenges the autonomous place or standpoint from which Flusser is able to theorize such processes—a challenge of which Flusser is fully aware, and which he incorporates into his vision of a new media regime, or a new humanity, bootstrapping itself into existence. Remarkably, however, Flusser is able to communicate this complex image without detailed technical discussions of the underlying philosophical and information-theoretical models; his analysis of the existential stakes of the shift in communication and the rise of technical images is accomplished instead by way of a subtly self-reflexive method: eschewing the scholarly apparatus of footnotes and the careful documentation of philosophical debates, Flusser nevertheless maintains precision and clarity by resorting to technical images of his own. The many diagrams that populate the book are not simply illustrations of his ideas; rather, they are “technical images” in the precise sense that Flusser defines them: images that mediate concepts and hence begin to overcome the crisis of conceptual thinking that, he claims, plagues our world. In other words, while Flusser is describing these images as part of his attempt to gain a foothold and establish communication with the reader, he is also providing a tacit education in the deciphering of technical images—or helping to inculcate the foundations of the “technical imagination” that he is convinced we so desperately need if we are to survive and find meaning in the contemporary world.
Accordingly, Communicology is directly and literally engaged in the project of “sensing media” that names the book series in which it appears, and it is the directness of its attempt that will make it of broad interest and appeal, beyond the specialist discourses in which Flusser’s name is already familiar. Of course, many of the specifics of the book—including, centrally, its discussions of photography, film, and video from a point in time before they were so radically transformed by digital, interactive, and networked media—will seem dated. Nevertheless, it is in terms of the broad and compellingly provocative picture painted of a world in transition that Flusser’s book remains of contemporary theoretical interest. It is impossible to read his diagnosis of the crisis precipitated by an explosion of technical images, and our lack of agreed upon means for coding and decoding them, without thinking about our current “post-truth” moment. Indeed, the erosion of shared codes with which to communicate, the political turmoil that ensues when communication breaks down, and the return to a pseudo-magical form of consciousness: all of these resonate strongly with contemporary social media bubbles, the rise of “meme magic,” and fascist-leaning movements like Qanon. My point is not that Flusser was prophetic, or that he saw any of this coming (at least not in the forms that it actually took), but I do want to suggest that the urgency of developing a “technical imagination” is more pressing than ever, and that Flusser’s book is extremely useful in terms of impressing upon its readers that urgency. Furthermore, its proposals for developing the needed imagination (or imagistic literacy) are, for all their limitations, occasionally quite inspired and can, at the very least, provide a baseline for further media-philosophical attempts. Indeed, Flusser understands his book as provisional at best, and he ends it with a modest plea for readers to improve upon his attempts and to take up the “commitment to communication” that he sees in peril.
In sum, Communicology will be of great interest to specialists in media philosophy and posthumanism, but it also has the potential to reach broader audiences, including non-specialist readers interested in our current media-technical and political predicament.
There are a couple of new reviews of Discorrelated Images, for which I am very grateful — one in the most recent issue of Film-Philosophy, by Christian de Moulipied Sancto, and another (in Italian) by Angela Maiello in Imago.
Sancto calls the book “virtuosic,” and writes: “For anyone concerned with digital media in particular and media theory in general, Discorrelated Images is essential reading.”
Maiello compares my project to that of Bernard Stiegler, writing: “The theoretical stakes of the book … are very high: it is neither a question of looking at these developments of the digital image as a mere aesthetic question of style, nor of remaining trapped in the problem of the technical infrastructure underlying these images. It is a question of understanding the transformative impact that new image technologies have in explaining experience, in the establishment of the subject-object relationship and therefore in the process of individuation, to return to Stiegler, both singular and collective.”
Finally, as a bonus, here is the (unedited) audio of the German book launch of Discorrelated Images, which took place on June 23, 2022 at Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin. Thanks to Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan for organizing the event and for discussing the book with me!
On Wednesday, December 8, 2021 (12:00 – 1:00pm Pacific time), I will be in conversation with Jacob Gaboury about his excellent new book Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics for UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities.
The event will be livestreamed on YouTube and is therefore open for all to view.
Marcus Maloney has a perceptive new review of Discorrelated Images in Thesis Eleven (as an open-access online-first article). While not uncritical, Maloney’s review includes some high praise for the book, including this passage that I can only hope to live up to:
“I have always wondered what it might have been like to read the first edition of, say, Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), or Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society (1992) – that is, before such texts became widely recognized as the important works they are. Reading Denson’s dense and ambitious book is as close as I have yet come to achieving that feeling.”
Amerika, a renowned remix artist and theorist, has put together a fitting and original provocation, challenging the theory/practice divide by co-authoring his book with the open source artificial intelligence GPT-2. Appropriately enough, GPT-2’s successor, GPT-3, has provided a blurb for the book:
“This book is so radically different from anything else out there, it has the potential to revolutionize the way you think about human history and the origins of the world.”
“This book is an expression of the truth that you’re a robot.”
“This book explains how our society is turning into a mechanical paradise, and how we’re doomed.”
I am excited and honored that my book Discorrelated Images has been shortlisted for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) 2021 Book Prize. It is in amazing company:
Thanks to the committee for the 2021 Book Prize: Ignacio Sánchez Prado (Chair, Professor, Spanish, Latin American Studies, & Film and Media Studies, Washington University in St. Louis), Lauren M. Cramer (Assistant Professor, Cinema Studies, University of Toronto), and Min Hyoung Song (Professor, English, Boston College).
And congratulations to all of the shortlisted authors!
Julia Leyda and I were interviewed about the new translation of (selected essays from) our edited collection Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. The interview, in Turkish, is now up at Gazete Duvar. For those of you who don’t speak Turkish (like me), here’s the original English:
You assert that “rather than positing a clear break with the past, the term post-cinema asks us more forcefully than the notion of ‘new media’ for example, to think about the relation (rather than mere distinction) between older and newer media regimes”. With the prefix ‘post’, you’re not indicating the death of cinema or an era that is after the cinematic but you talk about the space where the cinematic meets the digital, the computational. Could you please expand more on your understanding of the term ‘post-cinema’?
Julia Leyda: The digital is an important aspect of post-cinema, absolutely. Yet I also still see a film like Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) as post-cinematic, in that it was seen primarily via bootleg VHS tapes for several decades before appearing on video sharing sites like YouTube. The cable and satellite TV boom and the almost total saturation of home video technology in the late 20th century also fed into what we now call post-cinema, in the decentering of the viewing space and the proliferation of the “poor image” even before the digital copies that Hito Steyerl describes so eloquently.
Shane Denson: Yes, I agree completely. The prefix post- isn’t supposed to mark a simple before and after. We think the digital marks a clear difference from celluloid-based cinema, but it’s one that builds on transformations connected with television, analog video, and early computational technologies, among others. Steve Shaviro somewhere remarks that it’s less about the newness of post-cinema, and more about the fact that these changes, which have been building for over fifty years, finally reached a critical mass in the twenty-first century, and that it no longer makes sense to pretend that the media regime we live in is adequately described by theories of the cinema—which is not to say that cinema-centric approaches are suddenly rendered useless, but they have to be resituated in a broader context, which we call post-cinema.
Reading your introduction, I also noticed that my meeting with cinema was indeed post-cinematic. In my childhood, I watched many films not at the theaters but in my house from the DVDs, connected to the tv screen. So I guess for a long time now, we are in the ‘post-cinematic’ age, with or without recognising it. Maybe the term just helped us to assign meaning, enabled us to discuss our experience?
JL: Precisely. The post in our usage of post-cinema is not meant to be stand for a hard break, but a gradual shift in which old and new technologies and social practices exist at the same time. In this sense, the dominant, emergent, and residual cultural forms overlap, much as earlier media theorists like Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall observed.
SD: And we don’t really know where things are going, either. Post-cinema is very much in flux, as the rise of streaming services and their recent proliferation (and some demises) attest. The pandemic really shook things up, of course, bringing new moving-image platforms into our lives and, at least temporarily, displacing traditional cinematic screenings (which haven’t actually been very “traditional” for quite some time). I think this was a good reminder that media are always in transition, and post-cinema doesn’t describe a fixed state but precisely this flux and transitionality that marks moving-image media technologies and cultures alike.
I would like to echo a question asked by Steven Shaviro in his blog ‘The Pinocchio Theory’. He says “what is the role or position of cinema when it is no longer what Fredric Jameson calls a ‘cultural dominant,’ when it has been ‘surpassed’ by digital and computer-based media? So what’s the position of cinema in the 21st century?
SD: I think this depends on what aspects of the cinema we are emphasizing—whether we are thinking primarily of screening venues, industries, experiences, or images, for example. The industries that produced “cinema” aren’t gone, and many of them are more powerful than ever. But their consolidation into global multimedia conglomerates has also transformed them, so that they are more closely bound up with the data and financial sectors. And the latter, where the dominant power resides, have very little to do with images—but everything to do with our experience.
JL: One position the cinema has come to occupy in 2020-21 during the pandemic is a place of nostalgia. As the aesthetics of “films” were already more tailored to the home screen where they will likely be viewed on a streaming service, the sudden shutdown of collective exhibition venues has exacerbated my awareness of the limitations of my living room screening options. I have sympathized with many of my cinephile colleagues and friends experiencing grief over the loss of the moviegoing experience at this time, although my own tendencies in recent years had already leaned more toward home viewing.
You brought many different (and sometimes contradicting) authors together in this volume. Is this because the term ‘post-cinema’ itself includes various and sometimes contradicting meanings in itself?
JL: Absolutely. We felt it was very important to balance the book with contributions from the many approaches within film and media studies: philosophy, history, technology, as well as feminist, cultural studies, and environmental approaches. In particular, we tried to avoid producing a volume that would replicate what Racquel Gates and Michael Gillespie remind us about in their manifesto: the historic dominance of white men in film theory, in terms of practitioners and of objects of research, that still endures.
SD: Exactly. Again, the one thing we wanted to avoid is the impression that post-cinema is a single, fixed thing. It remains in flux, as the shifting site of negotiations between experience and culture, on the one hand, and changing environments and infrastructures. And questions of power and perspective are central to any attempt to account for these changes.
If you were to write and edit the book today, which discussions would you include/exclude in your edition?
JL: We definitely would need to discuss this! To name a couple of new developments I would want to include, there has been a lot more interesting work in eco-media studies, and I would also be very interested in including chapters that look at trans aesthetics and affects as interventions in the way we produce, perceive, and consume film and television. And of course the pandemic, as an abrupt change in social practices around cinema, television, and mobile video.
SD: I totally agree. Of course, the technological and industrial contexts have continued to change over the past couple of years, even before the pandemic. And who knows what the world will look like in a year or two? Even more importantly, our political realities have shifted in the past five years, with fascist and quasi-fascist movements on the rise around the world, but also major uprisings, such as took place in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, caught on a smartphone and circulated around the world.
What particular messages would you like to give your readers living in Turkey who are enthusiastically waiting to read your book in their native language?
JL/SD: Welcome to the book and please enjoy it! We are so delighted to share it!
A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by Roger Whitson and Christian Haines for the Gamers with Glasses podcast. I don’t wear glasses, and I’m honestly not much of a gamer these days, but we still found lots of things to talk about, like:
what the Transformers movies might teach us about philosophy, how streaming has transformed how we literally see things, the appeal of vinyl records, and how Netflix and Hulu might just be responsible for the end of the world!
We also talked a little about my book Discorrelated Images (which is currently 50% off during Duke University Press’s Fall Sale with code FALL21). Check it out!
Under the title Post-Sinema – 21. Yüzyıl Sinemasının Kuramsallaştırılması, select essays from the open-access collection Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Filmhave now been translated into Turkish and published by NotaBene Yayınları.
Here is the table of contents:
The book can be purchased directly from the publisher, here.
