Reading the Figural, Or, Philosophy After the New MediaIn 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-François 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. |
Contents
The Antinomic Character of Time | 153 |
Anteroom Thinking or The Last Things before the Last | 162 |
A Genealogy of Time | 170 |
The MovementImage and TimeImage | 171 |
Hegel Nietzsche | 177 |
Genealogy Countermemory Event | 186 |
An Uncertain UtopiaDigital Culture | 203 |
A Digression on Postmodernism | 206 |
| 76 | |
| 80 | |
Hieroglyphics Montage Enunciation | 89 |
The Ends of the Aesthetic | 107 |
The Historical Image | 141 |
Social Hieroglyphs and the Optics of History | 145 |
Three Questions concerning Digital Culture | 210 |
An Impossible Ideal of Power | 227 |
Notes | 235 |
Bibliography | 259 |
Index | 269 |
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Common terms and phrases
according activity aesthetic appears beautiful becomes body called capitalism chapter cinema collective communication concept continually critical critique culture defined Deleuze Deleuze's derives Derrida desire dialectical direct discourse distinction emergence essay example existence experience expression fact figural film finally force Foucault freedom French function gives Hegel human idea identity imagination important interest judgment Kant knowledge Kracauer language Last less linguistic logic longer Lyotard machinic marked Marxism mass meaning movement movement-image nature object organization origin painting philosophy play political possible present problem produce pure question reading reality reason reference relation representation represented respect sense signification signs social space spatial speech structure studies sublime takes technologies temporal textual theory things thought time-image tion Trans transformation translation truth understanding universal virtual visible visual writing
Popular passages
Page 112 - Albeit, then, between the realm of the natural concept, as the sensible, and the realm of the concept of freedom, as the supersensible...
Page 244 - Hence the author of a product for which he is indebted to his genius does not know himself how he has come by his Ideas; and he has not the power to devise the like at pleasure or in accordance with a plan, and to communicate it to others in precepts that will enable them to produce similar products. (Hence it is probable that the word genius...
Page 190 - ... the accidents, the minute deviations — or conversely, the complete reversals — the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us...
Page 247 - A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past — which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.
Page 19 - A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.
Page 67 - It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other's terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say.
Page 75 - But if one wishes to keep the relation of language to vision open, if one wishes to treat their incompatibility as a starting-point for speech instead of as an obstacle to be avoided, so as to stay as close as possible to both, then one must erase those proper names and preserve the infinity of the task.
Page 161 - The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance— namely, in just the same way.
Page 189 - Why does Nietzsche challenge the pursuit of the origin (Ursprung), at least on those occasions when he is truly a genealogist? First, because it is an attempt to capture the exact essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected identities; because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession.
References to this book
Bibliographic information
| Title | Reading the Figural, Or, Philosophy After the New Media Post-Contemporary Interventions Reading the Figural, Or, Philosophy After the New Media, David Norman Rodowick |
| Author | David Rodowick |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | Duke University Press, 2001 |
| ISBN | 0822327228, 9780822327226 |
| Length | 276 pages |
| Subjects | › Philosophy / Aesthetics Social Science / Media Studies |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |