I am excited to announce that Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal, by The DISCO Network, will be the sixth volume in the Sensing Media book series! See below for a description, and see here for more info.
From Munchausen by Tiktok to wellness apps to online communities to AI, the DISCO Network explores the possibilities that technoskepticism can create.
This is a book about possibility and refusal in relation to new technologies. Though refusal is an especially powerful mode—particularly for those who have historically not been given the option to say no—people of color and disabled people have long navigated the space between saying yes and saying no to the newest technologies. Technoskepticism relates some of these stories to reveal the possibilities skepticism can create.
The case for technoskepticism unfolds across three sections: the first focused on disability, the creative use of wellness apps, and the desire for diagnosis; the second on digital nostalgia and home for Black and Asian users who produced communities online before home pages gave way to profiles; and the third focused on the violence inherent in A.I.-generated Black bodies and the possibilities for Black style in the age of A.I. Acknowledging how the urge to refuse new technologies emerges from specific racialized histories, the authors also emphasize how care can look like an exuberant embrace of the new.
About the author
The DISCO Network is an intergenerational collective of researchers, artists, technologists, policymakers, and practitioners working together to challenge digital social and racial inequalities. Participants include David Adelman, André Brock, Aaron Dial, Stephanie Dinkins, Rayvon Fouché, Huan He, Jeff Nagy, Lisa Nakamura, Catherine Knight Steele, Rianna Walcott, Kevin Winstead, Remi Yergeau, and Lida Zeitlin-Wu.
I just stumbled upon this interesting looking video response from Kevin Munger to Vilém Flusser’s Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations?, which appeared in the “Sensing Media” book series that I edit with Wendy Chun for Stanford University Press.
The above (posted on Twitter here) is an excerpt of a longer video accessible if you subscribe to the New Models Patreon or Substack. I haven’t subscribed, so I’m 100% sure what to expect, but it looks provocative!
I am excited to announce that Timon Beyes’s Organizing Color: Toward a Chromatics of the Social will be the fifth volume in the Sensing Media book series! See below for a description, and see here for more info.
We live in a world that is saturated with color, but how should we make sense of color’s force and capacities? This book develops a theory of color as fundamental medium of the social.
Constructed as a montage of scenes from the past two hundred years, Organizing Color demonstrates how the interests of capital, management, governance, science, and the arts have wrestled with colour’s allure and flux. Beyes takes readers from Goethe’s chocolate experiments in search of chromatic transformation to nineteenth-century Scottish cotton mills designed to modulate workers’ moods and productivity, from the colonial production of Indigo in India to globalized categories of skin colorism and their disavowal. Tracing the consumption, control and excess of industrial and digital color, other chapters stage encounters with the literary chromatics of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow processing the machinery of the chemical industries, the red of political revolt in Godard’s films, and the blur of education and critique in Steyerl’s Adorno’s Grey.
Contributing to a more general reconsideration of aesthetic capitalism and the role of sensory media, this book seeks to pioneer a theory of social organization—a “chromatics of organizing”—that is attuned to the protean and world-making capacity of color.
Timon Beyes is Professor of Sociology of Organisation and Culture at Leuphana University Lüneburg.
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Endorsements:
“The immanent critique and ‘tender empiricism’ of this book, its eloquence and capacity to move from detailed grounding to exciting passages of speculative thought, ensures that Organizing Color escapes ‘the archaic stillness of the book.’ Impressively researched and written.”
—Seán Cubitt, University of Melbourne
“Inventive, brilliantly written, and very readable, Organizing Color recovers and explicates the relevance of color to social form—be that chromatic or racialized color.”
—Esther Leslie, Birkbeck, University of London
“Organizing is often imagined as a functional concept that belongs in business schools. In this beautifully written and illustrated book, Timon Beyes sprinkles aesthetics and politics over this black and white picture. The result is a breathtaking work that will change the way we understand how to ‘see’ organization.”
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.
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.
I am happy to announce that Vilém Flusser’s Communicology, edited and translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes and with a foreword by N. Katherine Hayles, will be published this December in the Sensing Media book series that I co-edit with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun for Stanford University Press!
There are already some great endorsements of the book:
“Flusser is a painter of oblique strokes, dismantling familiar perspectives. Never less than entertaining, Communicology refreshes, challenges and blasts open unexpected vistas.”
—Seán Cubitt, University of Melbourne
“If you are in search of Flusser the media theorist, indeed, if you are seeking to understand how information works, Communicology is it. Flusser teases out the kinds of fundamental questions that are at the core of the human experience.”
—Anke Finger, University of Connecticut
“Communicology is a central work for any appraisal of Flusser’s thinking, and an innovative and singular introduction to media theory.”
—Erick Felinto, State University of Rio de Janeiro
“Communicology is an important work for the study of media theory in general and, more specifically, Flusser’s own communication theory.”
—Rodrigo Petronio, Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation
To these I wanted to add a few more detailed notes, as series co-editor, on why this book, written in the late 1970s, might be of interest to readers today:
Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations is an important entry in the oeuvre of Vilém Flusser, the Czech-Brazilian thinker whose work has in recent years become an important point of reference in discussions within media theory, philosophy of technology, and posthumanism, among others. The significance of Communicology within this larger body of work is at least fourfold: 1) it is perhaps the clearest statement of Flusser’s theory of communication as involving a variably mediated relation between humans and the world, and hence an existential relation that has entered into a period of crisis with the transition from a textual-literary code to the media of “technical images” (such as photography, film, television, and digital imaging processes); 2) as the most systematic statement of this theory, which provocatively covers human communication from prehistoric to contemporary forms (from early uses of images to the rise of alphabetic writing to scientific and popular forms of technical media), the book provides essential context and background for more well-known but more narrowly focused works, such as Into the Universe of Technical Images (English translation published in 2011 with University of Minnesota Press); 3) it furthermore provides one of the most accessible entry points into Flusser’s work, and may thus also serve as a useful introduction for readers not yet familiar (and it should be emphasized that Flusser’s work, despite the increasing frequency with which he is cited, still remains only vaguely understood, in part because key works such as this one are not yet available in English); 4) finally, it offers a provocative view of a media situation that, while aimed at diagnosing and confronting political-communicational crises of the late 1970s (when it was composed), has uncanny resonances with our own “post-truth” era.
This is to say that Flusser’s Communicology is of interest for historical and theoretical reasons alike, and that it is capable of speaking to both specialized, academic readerships and broader, uninitiated audiences as well. As a historical document, it records an attempt to come to terms with changes happening in the moment—changes involving a massive and indeed global transformation of the technical infrastructures of mediated communication, which the author sees as the very infrastructures of perception and of thought. As such, the effort to think or take stock of these changes is radically precarious, without a stable foundation; notions of causality and truth are up for grabs, and with them the meaning not only of specific communications but of human existence itself. Flusser’s theory of communication is clearly informed by existentialism (an influence that peeks through in occasional references to Heidegger or Sartre, for example), but it is even more centrally informed by cybernetics and information theory: by the notion of feedback, for example, which is both exemplified in Flusser’s analyses of humans’ “programming” by the codes of traditional and technical media but which also, from a formal perspective, challenges the autonomous place or standpoint from which Flusser is able to theorize such processes—a challenge of which Flusser is fully aware, and which he incorporates into his vision of a new media regime, or a new humanity, bootstrapping itself into existence. Remarkably, however, Flusser is able to communicate this complex image without detailed technical discussions of the underlying philosophical and information-theoretical models; his analysis of the existential stakes of the shift in communication and the rise of technical images is accomplished instead by way of a subtly self-reflexive method: eschewing the scholarly apparatus of footnotes and the careful documentation of philosophical debates, Flusser nevertheless maintains precision and clarity by resorting to technical images of his own. The many diagrams that populate the book are not simply illustrations of his ideas; rather, they are “technical images” in the precise sense that Flusser defines them: images that mediate concepts and hence begin to overcome the crisis of conceptual thinking that, he claims, plagues our world. In other words, while Flusser is describing these images as part of his attempt to gain a foothold and establish communication with the reader, he is also providing a tacit education in the deciphering of technical images—or helping to inculcate the foundations of the “technical imagination” that he is convinced we so desperately need if we are to survive and find meaning in the contemporary world.
Accordingly, Communicology is directly and literally engaged in the project of “sensing media” that names the book series in which it appears, and it is the directness of its attempt that will make it of broad interest and appeal, beyond the specialist discourses in which Flusser’s name is already familiar. Of course, many of the specifics of the book—including, centrally, its discussions of photography, film, and video from a point in time before they were so radically transformed by digital, interactive, and networked media—will seem dated. Nevertheless, it is in terms of the broad and compellingly provocative picture painted of a world in transition that Flusser’s book remains of contemporary theoretical interest. It is impossible to read his diagnosis of the crisis precipitated by an explosion of technical images, and our lack of agreed upon means for coding and decoding them, without thinking about our current “post-truth” moment. Indeed, the erosion of shared codes with which to communicate, the political turmoil that ensues when communication breaks down, and the return to a pseudo-magical form of consciousness: all of these resonate strongly with contemporary social media bubbles, the rise of “meme magic,” and fascist-leaning movements like Qanon. My point is not that Flusser was prophetic, or that he saw any of this coming (at least not in the forms that it actually took), but I do want to suggest that the urgency of developing a “technical imagination” is more pressing than ever, and that Flusser’s book is extremely useful in terms of impressing upon its readers that urgency. Furthermore, its proposals for developing the needed imagination (or imagistic literacy) are, for all their limitations, occasionally quite inspired and can, at the very least, provide a baseline for further media-philosophical attempts. Indeed, Flusser understands his book as provisional at best, and he ends it with a modest plea for readers to improve upon his attempts and to take up the “commitment to communication” that he sees in peril.
In sum, Communicology will be of great interest to specialists in media philosophy and posthumanism, but it also has the potential to reach broader audiences, including non-specialist readers interested in our current media-technical and political predicament.
Amerika, a renowned remix artist and theorist, has put together a fitting and original provocation, challenging the theory/practice divide by co-authoring his book with the open source artificial intelligence GPT-2. Appropriately enough, GPT-2’s successor, GPT-3, has provided a blurb for the book:
“This book is so radically different from anything else out there, it has the potential to revolutionize the way you think about human history and the origins of the world.”
“This book is an expression of the truth that you’re a robot.”
“This book explains how our society is turning into a mechanical paradise, and how we’re doomed.”
I have been sitting on this news for a while now, and I am excited that I can finally share it: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and I are editing a new book series at Stanford University Press called “Sensing Media” that is devoted to the aesthetics, philosophies, and cultures of media.
We are especially interested in contributions that rethink media aesthetics, understood broadly to include both artistic uses of media and their sensory dimensions; that conceive media as the site where art and technology converge; and that expand the scope of media-philosophical discussions to include global and heretofore marginalized perspectives. We are excited to explore the connections between sensory forms and their infrastructures, between media technologies and aesthetic sensibilities, and more generally between media and the many possible worlds they disclose.
Please spread the word about the new series, and consider submitting your manuscripts. If you have questions, you can direct them to me, Wendy Chun, or Executive Editor Erica Wetter, with whom we are thrilled to be working on this series. We look forward to learning about your work!
