My new book Post-Cinematic Bodieshas not, as far as I know, been translated, but it is getting some discussion in languages other than English. An interview I gave recently for Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences has been circulating on other sites, including this Spanish translation. And now there’s also what appears to be an hour-long walkthrough of the book in Chinese by a Shanghai-based YouTuber.
Incidentally, a new volume is out in Chinese, titled Flash-Forward, which includes translations of a number of chapters from the 2016 open-access book that I co-edited with Julia Leyda: Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film.
Recently, I was interviewed by Andrew Myers for Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. The exchange, which focuses on my recent book Post-Cinematic Bodies, is now online: here.
An open-access version of the book can be downloaded for free from meson press (here), and a limited number of print copies are available for purchase at Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin, where the book launch was held on July 3. Paperbacks will be more widely available soon; the book is currently listed on Amazon Germany, and it should be appearing for other regions in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
Here are some pictures from the book launch, where I was in conversation with Mark Hansen. Turnout was great, and it was lots of fun!
In conversation with Mark HansenTrying to answer one of Mark’s tough questions!Reading from the bookEnjoying a cool beverageHow many famous media theorists can you spot?Mark B. N. HansenFrancesco CasettiEylül İşcen and Karin DensonSelfie with friendsDinner afterwards: Karin Denson, Shane Denson, Mark Hansen, Francesco Casetti, Bernard Geoghegan, and Siddhartha Lokanandi
Please note: Due to factors outside of my control, the book launch event for Post-Cinematic Bodies, originally scheduled for this Thursday June 29, has been postponed to next Monday, July 3 at 7pm.
I am happy to announce that I will be in conversation with Mark B. N. Hansen!
Please also note the change of venue, to the Kurfürstenstraße location of Hopscotch Reading Room!
On Thursday, June 29, Hopscotch Reading Room (Gerichtstraße 43 in the Wedding district of Berlin) will be hosting a book launch event for my new book Post-Cinematic Bodies — which will be out both in print and open-access digital formats from meson press. There will be paperbacks available for purchase at the launch, and they’ll be more widely available soon afterwards. If you’re in town, come out around 7pm for a short reading, discussion, and drinks!
I am happy to announce that Edmund Mendelssohn’s White Musical Mythologies: Sonic Presence in Modernism will be the fourth volume in the Sensing Media book series! See below for a description, and see here for more info or to pre-order!
In a narrative that extends from fin de siècle Paris to the 1960s, Edmund Mendelssohn examines modernist thinkers and composers who engaged with non-European and pre-modern cultures as they developed new conceptions of “pure sound.” Pairing Erik Satie with Bergson, Edgard Varèse with Bataille, Pierre Boulez with Artaud, and John Cage with Derrida, White Musical Mythologies offers an ambitious critical history of the ontology of sound, suggesting that the avant-garde ideal of “pure sound” was always an expression of western ethnocentrism.
Each of the musicians studied in this book re-created or appropriated non-European forms of expression as they conceived music ontologically, often thinking music as something immediate and immersive: from Satie’s dabblings with mysticism and exoticism in bohemian Montmartre of the 1890s to Varèse’s experience of ethnographic exhibitions and surrealist poetry in 1930s Paris, and from Boulez’s endeavor to theorize a kind of musical writing that would “absorb” the sounds of non-European musical traditions to Cage, who took inspiration from Eastern thought as he wrote about sound, silence, and chance. These modernist artists believed that the presence effects of sound in their moment were more real and powerful than the outmoded norms of the European musical past. By examining musicians who strove to produce sonic presence, specifically by re-thinking the concept of musical writing (écriture), the book demonstrates that we cannot fully understand French theory in its novelty and complexity without music and sound.
Edmund Mendelssohn is Lecturer in Music at the University of California, Berkeley.
My book Post-Cinematic Bodies, coming soon from meson press, now has a great set of endorsements (blurbs) from three scholars that I greatly respect and admire: Rizvana Bradley, Francesco Casetti, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht — a group of scholars that reflects the interdisciplinary conversation I hope to provoke across film and media studies, literary theory/philosophical aesthetics, and the study of gender and race in contemporary art and visual culture.
We have long been feeling how the type of embodied identification suggested by the Hollywood classics was in a process of dissolution. Thanks to a sophisticated mediation between the phenomenology of perception and theories of digital media, Shane Denson provides us with concepts and a first understanding of this transition and its far-reaching existential consequences.
—Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University
What if digital media changed not only traditional forms of communication, but also our very bodies, because of the way they address us? In this brilliant study, Shane Denson suggests that, from a phenomenological perspective, our bodies are always at the forefront of our mediation with the world; digital media involve our sensorium in an unprecedented way and this commitment represents their true “revolution.” A myriad of examples, including screens in gyms aimed at enhancing our exercises, are proof of this. Philosophically dense, analytically sharp, this book unearths what lies beneath our digital experiences.
—Francesco Casetti, Yale University
Refusing both the perfunctory valorization of the body as site of resistive potentiality and the diametric reflex to dismiss theories of embodiment as exercises in the foreclosure of criticality, Shane Denson advances a rigorous theory of mediated corporeality within the metabolic life of post-cinema, with profound implications for the politics of (counter-)capture across microtemporalities and planetary scales.
—Rizvana Bradley, University of California, Berkeley
Coming soon from meson press, in the Configurations of Film book series!
Post-Cinematic Bodies
How is human embodiment transformed in an age of algorithms? How do post-cinematic media technologies such as AI, VR, and robotics target and re-shape our bodies? Post-Cinematic Bodies grapples with these questions by attending both to mundane devices—such as smartphones, networked exercise machines, and smart watches and other wearables equipped with heartrate sensors—as well as to new media artworks that rework such equipment to reveal to us the ways that our fleshly existences are increasingly up for grabs. Through an equally philosophical and interpretive analysis, the book aims to develop a new aesthetics of embodied experience that is attuned to a new age of predictive technology and metabolic capitalism.
Today is publication day for Vilém Flusser’s Commmunicology: Mutations in Human Relations! This is the second volume in the Sensing Media series (which I co-edit with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun for Stanford University Press), and it includes a foreword by N. Katherine Hayles. Find more info here.
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.
