Natasha Lushetich

Special Focus editor: Natasha Lushetich Series editors: Rüdiger Ahrens, Florian Kläger, Klaus Stierstorfer Symbolism is cohesive. It gathers heterogeneity over time, across fields of human endeavor and systems of communication. Non-sequiturs, paradox and tautology, appear dissipative. Yet they are highly productive in reticular and fractal ways. Suffice it to look at the philosophical tautology of Parmenides’s kind, which suggests that being "is"; at the practice of the koan, which collapses dualistic thinking by way of incompatible propositions, such as "the Eastern hill keeps running on the water"; at logical paradoxes in which the operative logic is sabotaged by its own means, as in Hempel’s paradox; at absurdist dramatic texts in which protagonists record empty time in order to mark the emptiness of the time they are recording, as in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape; or at paradoxical games like Maciunas’s Prepared Table Tennis played with paddles that have huge holes in them. In all of these examples, the existence-apprehending processes occur via unexpected itineraries, in vacant but nevertheless enunciative codes, in seemingly futile, yet calibrating performances, and in a temporality that is the cumulative time’s "other." They catapult the mind into the realm of the extra-linguistic, the para-logical and the meta-experiential, or they transfigure it through a series of reticular iterations. Forty years after Varela et al’s groundbreaking work on the embodied, emotional and environmentally embedded mind – that marked a definitive departure from its former strictly rational conception – there is a need to re-examine the territory that lies beyond mind for a different reason: the proliferation of algorithmic logics that rely on the idea of a rational agent (human or algorithmic) making logical, self-serving decisions. This special issue explores neither-rational-nor-irrational forms of thinking and making. It sketches a cartography of a-rational processes of meaning- and knowledge-production that operate across numerous sites, practices, and disciplines: visual and media art; literature; art history; music; dance; film; intermedia and photography. Part I "Ahistoricity, Assemblages and Interpretative Reversals" focuses on the legacy of the (neo) avant-garde and amodernism. Part II "Destinerrance, Labyrinths and Folds" investigates the ways in which the Derridian delays/detours and the Deleuzian folding function as concrete ways of embodied knowledge-production. Part III, "Immanent Transcendence", offers a glimpse into the reticular and iterative structuring of transcendence that does not pre-exist immanence but is its residue.

Special Focus: Beyond Mind

Symbolism 2019

Iain Campbell

Contributors to this book include key theorists and practitioners from media theory, Native Science, bio-media and sound art, philosophy, art history and design informatics. Collectively, they examine the becoming-technique of animal-human- machinic perceptibilities; and micro-perceptions that lie beneath the threshold of known perceptions yet create energetic vibrations. Who, what, and where perceives, and how? What are the sedimentations, inscriptions and axiologies of animal, human and machinic perceptions? What are their perceptibilities? Deleuze uses the word ‘visibilities’ to indicate that visual perception isn’t just a physiological given but cues operations productive of new assemblages. Perceptibilities are, by analogy, spatio- temporal, geolocative, kinaesthetic, audio-visual, and haptic operations that are always already memory. In the case of strong inscriptions, they are also epigenetic events. The contributors show distributed perception to be a key notion in addressing the emergence and persistence of plant, animal, human and machine relations. An invaluable reference for students and scholars in a range of areas including Media Theory, Sociology, Philosophy, Art and Design.

Resonances and Axiologies

Distributed Perception

Drawing on a range of methods from across science and technology studies, digital humanities and digital arts, this book presents a comprehensive view of the big data phenomenon. Big data architectures are increasingly transforming political questions into technical management by determining classificatory systems in the social, educational, and healthcare realms. Data, and their multiple arborisations, have become new epistemic landscapes. They have also become new existential terrains. The fundamental question is: can big data be seen as a new medium in the way photography or film were when they first appeared? No new medium is ever truly new. It’s always remediation of older media. What is new is the medium’s re-articulation of the difference between here and there, before and after, yours and mine, knowable and unknowable, possible and impossible. This transdisciplinary volume, incorporating cultural and media theory, art, philosophy, history, and political philosophy is a key resource for readers interested in digital humanities, cultural, and media studies.

Natasha Lushetich

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