Excommunication Three Inquiries In Media And Mediation

Author : Alexander R. Galloway
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226925234
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Excommunication written by Alexander R. Galloway and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-12-06 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Always connect—that is the imperative of today’s media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself—those messages that state: “There will be no more messages”? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media and mediation on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of communication is integral to communication itself—instances they call excommunication. In three linked essays, Excommunication pursues this elusive topic by looking at mediation in the face of banishment, exclusion, and heresy, and by contemplating the possibilities of communication with the great beyond. First, Galloway proposes an original theory of mediation based on classical literature and philosophy, using Hermes, Iris, and the Furies to map out three of the most prevalent modes of mediation today—mediation as exchange, as illumination, and as network. Then, Thacker goes boldly beyond Galloway’s classification scheme by examining the concept of excommunication through the secret link between the modern horror genre and medieval mysticism. Charting a trajectory of examples from H. P. Lovecraft to Meister Eckhart, Thacker explores those instances when one communicates or connects with the inaccessible, dubbing such modes of mediation “haunted” or “weird” to underscore their inaccessibility. Finally, Wark evokes the poetics of the infuriated swarm as a queer politics of heresy that deviates from both media theory and the traditional left. He posits a critical theory that celebrates heresy and that is distinct from those that now venerate Saint Paul. Reexamining commonplace definitions of media, mediation, and communication, Excommunication offers a glimpse into the realm of the nonhuman to find a theory of mediation adequate to our present condition.

Author : Alexander Galloway
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1839764007
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Uncomputable written by Alexander Galloway and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A journey through the uncomputable remains of computer history Narrating some lesser known episodes from the deep history of digital machines, Alexander R. Galloway explains the technology that drives the world today, and the fascinating people who brought these machines to life. With an eye to both the computable and the uncomputable, Galloway shows how computation emerges or fails to emerge, how the digital thrives but also atrophies, how networks interconnect while also fray and fall apart. By re-building obsolete technology using today's software, the past comes to light in new ways, from intricate algebraic patterns woven on a hand loom, to striking artificial-life simulations, to war games and back boxes. A description of the past, this book is also an assessment of all that remains uncomputable as we continue to live in the aftermath of the long digital age.

Author : Alexander R. Galloway
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 0745662927
Total Pages : 147 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Interface Effect written by Alexander R. Galloway and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-20 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interfaces are back, or perhaps they never left. The familiar Socratic conceit from the Phaedrus, of communication as the process of writing directly on the soul of the other, has returned to center stage in today's discussions of culture and media. Indeed Western thought has long construed media as a grand choice between two kinds of interfaces. Following the optimistic path, media seamlessly interface self and other in a transparent and immediate connection. But, following the pessimistic path, media are the obstacles to direct communion, disintegrating self and other into misunderstanding and contradiction. In other words, media interfaces are either clear or complicated, either beautiful or deceptive, either already known or endlessly interpretable. Recognizing the limits of either path, Galloway charts an alternative course by considering the interface as an autonomous zone of aesthetic activity, guided by its own logic and its own ends: the interface effect. Rather than praising user-friendly interfaces that work well, or castigating those that work poorly, this book considers the unworkable nature of all interfaces, from windows and doors to screens and keyboards. Considered allegorically, such thresholds do not so much tell the story of their own operations but beckon outward into the realm of social and political life, and in so doing ask a question to which the political interpretation of interfaces is the only coherent answer. Grounded in philosophy and cultural theory and driven by close readings of video games, software, television, painting, and other images, Galloway seeks to explain the logic of digital culture through an analysis of its most emblematic and ubiquitous manifestation – the interface.

Author : Charles G. Häberl
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110487861
Total Pages : 474 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Mandaean Book of John written by Charles G. Häberl and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-11-18 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given the degree of popular fascination with Gnostic religions, it is surprising how few pay attention to the one such religion that has survived from antiquity until the present day: Mandaism. Mandaeans, who esteem John the Baptist as the most famous adherent to their religion, have in our time found themselves driven from their historic homelands by war and oppression. Today, they are a community in crisis, but they provide us with unparalleled access to a library of ancient Gnostic scriptures, as part of the living tradition that has sustained them across the centuries. Gnostic texts such as these have caught popular interest in recent times, as traditional assumptions about the original forms and cultural contexts of related religious traditions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have been called into question. However, we can learn only so much from texts in isolation from their own contexts. Mandaean literature uniquely allows us not only to increase our knowledge about Gnosticism, and by extension all these other religions, but also to observe the relationship between Gnostic texts, rituals, beliefs, and living practices, both historically and in the present day.

Author : Simeon Djankov
Publisher : World Bank Publications
ISBN 13 : 9780821353417
Total Pages : 222 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Doing Business in 2004 written by Simeon Djankov and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2004 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A co-publication of the World Bank, International Finance Corporation and Oxford University Press

Author : Alexander R. Galloway
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452942889
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Laruelle written by Alexander R. Galloway and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laruelle is one of the first books in English to undertake in an extended critical survey of the work of the idiosyncratic French thinker François Laruelle, the promulgator of non-standard philosophy. Laruelle, who was born in 1937, has recently gained widespread recognition, and Alexander R. Galloway suggests that readers may benefit from colliding Laruelle’s concept of the One with its binary counterpart, the Zero, to explore more fully the relationship between philosophy and the digital. In Laruelle, Galloway argues that the digital is a philosophical concept and not simply a technical one, employing a detailed analysis of Laruelle to build this case while referencing other thinkers in the French and Continental traditions, including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, and Immanuel Kant. In order to explain clearly Laruelle’s concepts such as the philosophical decision and the principle of sufficient philosophy, Galloway lays a broad foundation with his discussions of “the One” as it has developed in continental philosophy, the standard model of philosophy, and how philosophers view “the digital.” Digital machines dominate today’s world, while so-called digital thinking—that is, binary thinking such as presence and absence or self and world—is often synonymous with what it means to think at all. In examining Laruelle and digitality together, Galloway shows how Laruelle remains a profoundly non-digital thinker—perhaps the only non-digital thinker today—and engages in an extensive discussion on the interconnections between media, philosophy, and technology.

Author : Alexander R. Galloway
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452913323
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Exploit written by Alexander R. Galloway and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2013-11-30 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The network has become the core organizational structure for postmodern politics, culture, and life, replacing the modern era’s hierarchical systems. From peer-to-peer file sharing and massive multiplayer online games to contagion vectors of digital or biological viruses and global affiliations of terrorist organizations, the network form has become so invasive that nearly every aspect of contemporary society can be located within it. Borrowing their title from the hacker term for a program that takes advantage of a flaw in a network system, Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker challenge the widespread assumption that networks are inherently egalitarian. Instead, they contend that there exist new modes of control entirely native to networks, modes that are at once highly centralized and dispersed, corporate and subversive. In this provocative book-length essay, Galloway and Thacker argue that a whole new topology must be invented to resist and reshape the network form, one that is as asymmetrical in relationship to networks as the network is in relation to hierarchy.

Author : Graham Harman
Publisher : John Hunt Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1780999070
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Weird Realism written by Graham Harman and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2012-09-28 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Hölderlin was to Martin Heidegger and Mallarmé to Jacques Derrida, so is H.P. Lovecraft to the Speculative Realist philosophers. Lovecraft was one of the brightest stars of the horror and science fiction magazines, but died in poverty and relative obscurity in the 1930s. In 2005 he was finally elevated from pulp status to the classical literary canon with the release of a Library of America volume dedicated to his work. The impact of Lovecraft on philosophy has been building for more than a decade. Initially championed by shadowy guru Nick Land at Warwick during the 1990s, he was later discovered to be an object of private fascination for all four original members of the twenty-first century Speculative Realist movement. In this book, Graham Harman extracts the basic philosophical concepts underlying the work of Lovecraft, yielding a weird realism capable of freeing continental philosophy from its current soul-crushing impasse. Abandoning pious references by Heidegger to Hölderlin and the Greeks, Harman develops a new philosophical mythology centered in such Lovecraftian figures as Cthulhu, Wilbur Whately, and the rat-like monstrosity Brown Jenkin. The Miskatonic River replaces the Rhine and the Ister, while Hölderlin's Caucasus gives way to Lovecraft's Antarctic mountains of madness.

Author : Aldon Lynn Nielsen
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521555265
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Black Chant written by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-13 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of postmodernism and African-American poets.

Author : Stephen L. Carter
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0385474989
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Culture of Disbelief written by Stephen L. Carter and published by Anchor. This book was released on 1994-09-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Culture Of Disbelief has been the subject of an enormous amount of media attention from the first moment it was published. Hugely successful in hardcover, the Anchor paperback is sure to find a large audience as the ever-increasing, enduring debate about the relationship of church and state in America continues. In The Culture Of Disbelief, Stephen Carter explains how we can preserve the vital separation of church and state while embracing rather than trivializing the faith of millions of citizens or treating religious believers with disdain. What makes Carter's work so intriguing is that he uses liberal means to arrive at what are often considered conservative ends. Explaining how preserving a special role for religious communities can strengthen our democracy, The Culture Of Disbelief recovers the long tradition of liberal religious witness (for example, the antislavery, antisegregation, and Vietnam-era antiwar movements). Carter argues that the problem with the 1992 Republican convention was not the fact of open religious advocacy, but the political positions being advocated.