Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media , livre ebook

297

pages

English

Ebooks

2001

Écrit par
Rodowick David Rodowick

Publié par
Duke University Press

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297

pages

English

Ebooks

2001

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

11 septembre 2001

EAN13

9780822380764

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

In Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media D. N. Rodowick applies the concept of "the figural" to a variety of philosophical and aesthetic issues. Inspired by the aesthetic philosophy of Jean-Francois Lyotard, the figural defines a semiotic regime where the distinction between linguistic and plastic representation breaks down. This opposition, which has been the philosophical foundation of aesthetics since the eighteenth century, has been explicitly challenged by the new electronic, televisual, and digital media. Rodowick-one of the foremost film theorists writing today-contemplates this challenge, describing and critiquing the new regime of signs and new ways of thinking that such media have inaugurated.To fully comprehend the emergence of the figural requires a genealogical critique of the aesthetic, Rodowick claims. Seeking allies in this effort to deconstruct the opposition of word and image and to create new concepts for comprehending the figural, he journeys through a range of philosophical writings: Thierry Kuntzel and Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier on film theory; Jacques Derrida on the deconstruction of the aesthetic; Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin on the historical image as a utopian force in photography and film; and Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault on the emergence of the figural as both a semiotic regime and a new stratagem of power coincident with the appearance of digital phenomena and of societies of control.Scholars of philosophy, film theory, cultural criticism, new media, and art history will be interested in the original and sophisticated insights found in this book.

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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

11 septembre 2001

EAN13

9780822380764

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

READING THE FIGURAL,

or, Philosophy after the New Media

Post-Contemporary Interventions

Series Editors: Stanley Fish & Fredric Jameson

READING

THE

FIGURAL,

or, Philosophy after the New Media

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

D. N. Rodowick

D U R H A M & L O N D O N 2 0 0 1

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 

Typeset in Minion with

Franklin Gothic display by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

appear on the last printed page of this book.

ForDOMINIQUEandSARAH

CONTENTS

Preface / ix

Acknowledgments / xvii

OnePresenting the Figural / 

The Idea of the Figural / 

Lyotard’s Leap into the Void:

The Aesthetic before the New Media / 

Paradoxes of the Visual, or

Philosophy after the New Media / 

TwoReading the Figural / 

Rehearsing the Figural / 

Foucault through Deleuze, or

The Diagrammatics of Power / 

Reading the Figural / 

The End of Modernism / 

ThreeThe Figure and the Text / 

Film and the Scene of Writing / 

‘‘With dreams displaced into a forest of script’’ / 

Hieroglyphics, Montage, Enunciation / 

FourThe Ends of the Aesthetic / 

FiveThe Historical Image / 

A Plea for the Dead / 

Social Hieroglyphs and the Optics of History / 

The Antinomic Character of Time / 

Anteroom Thinking, or

‘‘The Last Things before the Last’’ / 

SixA Genealogy of Time / 

Two Stories of  / 

Two Audiovisual Regimes:

The Movement-Image and Time-Image / 

The Ends of the Dialectic and the Return

of History: Hegel and Nietzsche / 

Genealogy, Countermemory, Event / 

SevenAn Uncertain Utopia—Digital Culture / 

An Image of Technological Abundance / 

A Digression on Postmodernism / 

Three Questions concerning Digital Culture / 

An Impossible Ideal of Power / 

Notes / 

Bibliography / 

Index / 

PREFACE

‘‘A good book,’’ writes Jean-François Lyotard inDiscours, ﬁgure,‘‘would be one where linguistic time (the time of signiﬁcation and of read-ing) would itself be deconstructed: that the reader could start wher-ever s/he wishes and in whatever order, a book for grazing’’ (; my translation). Like Lyotard’sDiscours, ﬁgure,this is not a good book, an artist’s book, but rather a book of philosophy that still dreams of signi-ﬁcation. But perhaps philosophy can operate its own ﬁgural discourse: that of the rhizome. In this book, the ﬁgural functions as a nomadic concept circulating by knight’s moves among seven essays while mu-tating in its forms and dimensions through its encounters with diverse philosophers. Most of the essays included here have appeared in some published form, though all have been rewritten and most expanded to bring forward their conceptual links. These links are detachable, how-ever. The organization of the book is somewhat nonlinear, and the ordering of chapters is nonchronological, though not random. A rhi-zome, then, and not a book; each chapter may be read out of order, and perhaps readers will want to ﬁnd their own paths. Consider the following, then, as one map for reading the ﬁgural. Although these essays were written over a period of seventeen years, they emerged from a common research project responding to what was, for me, a fundamental intuition. Although I am a child of the seventies, and thus of a visual semiology inspired by the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, a form of structural analysis inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss, and a theory of ideology forwarded byScreen, my encounters with deconstruction and its critique of logocentrism convinced me early on that a linguistically inspired semiology was in-adequate for the study of visual culture. Moreover, with the explosive

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