Steven Shaviro

How and what does catastrophe complete, dissolve, or terminate in terms of philosophical thinking? In this paper I would like to argue that we can approach this question by addressing the Heideggerian call to abandon philosophy for a new kind of thinking—a call that, in the light of contemporary speculative developments, can also be seen as ‘catastrophic’ for its own part. This call for an end to philosophy itself opens up a problem of the transition from thinking of a radical break to thinking as a radical break. At the heart of my argument is Steven Shaviro’s idea that technologies are in a certain correlation with our concerns regarding reality and materiality.

The action sequences in Michael Bay’s Transformers series present impossible spaces. Instead of spatially orienting the spectator, these films aim for a maximum of action, a cacophony of movement where space once was. Bay states that he does not “get hung up on continuity”, arguing that the “intensity of the action doesn’t allow [the audience] to keep track of all these details”. My article analyses spatial noisiness in Bay’s films. 

Michel Serres states that “noise is a sign of the increase in complexity”, and Cecile Malaspina expands on this by tracing the ambiguities of noise in information theory. Eschewing the urge to place noise on the negative side of a Manichean dichotomy, Malaspina focuses instead on the “role of noise in the formation of knowledge”, arguing that “noise can become possible information”.

Instead of seeing the lack of spatial continuity in the Transformers films as an aberration from good filmmaking, this article will thus read the noisiness of Transformers as a kind of information. This will involve analysing Bay’s films through Steven Shaviro’s concept of “post-continuity” editing, where excessive affect trumps narrative concerns. If noise is a form of information, then perhaps Bay’s noisy films are indicative of future identities.

Dissertação apresentada ao Programa de Pós-Graduação em Cinema e Audiovisual da Universidade Federal Fluminense para obtenção do título de Mestra em Cinema e Audiovisual.

Orientadora: Marina Cavalcanti Tedesco
Linha de Pesquisa: Narrativas e Estéticas

http://ppgcine.cinemauff.com.br/egressos/

Though most neomaterialists share a commitment to the Copernican decentring of humans from the world stage, there is disagreement on the purposes of such an endeavour. The polemic stems from a fundamental discrepancy about what the return to materiality entails: is matter the principle of the non-thinking as such, or is it always already imbued with some sort of subjectivity? Is the new materialism's goal to come to terms with the non-living origin of life? Or is it rather to recognize that seemingly dead materials are always in some sense incipiently alive? For convenience , we can think of two neomaterialist perspectives: the rationalist or elim-inative neomaterialism, and the vitalist or panpsychist neomaterialism. I explore some of the conceptual problems faced by both camps and, drawing from the recently developed theory of consciousness as integrated information (Tononi), as well as its quantum physical construal by Max Tegmark, I suggest some provisional ways to address those issues.

The 2014 Mortgage Market Review in the United Kingdom prompted legislation that empowered lenders to scrutinize the personal bank statements of potential borrowers for proof of “consistent behavior of being able to live within their means.” Even when someone does not have any debt, they must behave as if they are indebted.
I contend that this type of debt-credit relationship works as a form of science fiction. I base this argument on Fredric Jameson’s definition of science fiction as an effort to imagine and chronicle a “future history.” The work of science fiction posits a future which, in turn, determines possibilities in the present. When lenders extrapolate the future from recent bank statements, they disregard the possibility that potential borrowers may change their lifestyle once making debt repayments. I propose the term “indebted futurism” to describe the phenomenon in which people are expected to prepare constantly for acquiring debt.
Indebted futurism is not only operative on an individual level, but also a societal one. In his book The Making of Indebted Man, Maurizo Lazzarato argues that the pervasive and exploitative relationship between Capital and Debtor means that “the future and its possibilities . . . devoted to reproducing capitalist power relations, seem to be frozen.” Any attempt to reform or replace capitalism must confront and overcome the control that the debt industry exerts over our futures.

*course design + syllabus* In brief summary, the preparation of a proposed syllabus for examining the textuality of the xenomorph reveals an expansive discourse on the Alien franchise and its key figure. The Alien franchise is ever-growing , lending strength to the thesis that the xenomorph is a rich textual object of media. After completion of the reading list and assignments, the goal would be to turn to Henry Jenkins’s work on ‘fan-text poaching’ in order to distinguish the hermeneutical relationship between ‘fan texts’ and ‘franchise texts’. The xenomorph can potentially be shown to have a varied textual quality (both open and closed) depending on the media and texts in which the xenomorph is represented and discussed. This claim could prove to be valuable to the general discourse on textuality, semiotics and hermeneutics.

In his later works (shortly after he wrote Being and Time in 1927), Heidegger started seing the whole project of philosophy since Plato as an error. Metaphysics, he held, has been rooted in humanism—a major mistake he himself made in his Being and Time, where he analysed Being through human Dasein. This paper gives an overview of Heidegger's later works in the context of the concept of 'catastrophe' as a turn in thinking. This analysis posits Heidegger's antihumanism in the light of the contemporary developments in speculative thought.

The motion picture Spring Breakers, directed by Harmony Korine, is employed to illustrate a schizoanalysis of identity politics or neoliberal multiculturalism wherein specific subject positions that have become hypostatized, as for example in race, gender, or sexual categories, are set in motion toward a tactical and processual complexification. This is accomplished, primarily, via an analysis of the semantic drift and emptiness of the refrain, the apotheosis of surfaces, the deterritorializing powers of the black hole, the phallus as artifice, and the answer in becoming-sprite coinciding with the end result, which is ultimately a paroxysmal transversality. Future directions are outlined as it relates to diagrammatizing the girls in the film with Pussy Riot, the appointment of Jonas Åkerlund as the director of Spring Breakers: The Second Coming, and the continual creation of identities as a means to outmaneuver, strategically, the forms of imprisonment instituted by molar assemblages such as capitalist multiculturalism. Following the model of Brit and Candy, the unique form, suggested by the film, that this takes is to set upon becoming-sprite: a catalytic fairy always processing toward the virtual.

This extended essay critically examines cinema in the digital format in relation to its traditional, celluloid-based predecessor. Using seminal texts of the field, such as What is Cinema by Lev Manovich, it analyses the unique aesthetics and identity of recent works by directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Pedro Costa that use mainly digital, live-action footage, and asks – through a series of reflections upon reviews, interviews, and key films and theoretical sources of digital cinema – where digital cinema lies in relation to the analogue medium of motion pictures. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the historical and contemporary theory of the subject. Chapter 2 surveys the contemporary landscape of digital cinema. Chapter 3 examines the recent blockbuster Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Lastly, Chapter 4 presents a case study of Pedro Costa’s evolution from the analogue to the digital medium and examines his digital work as a continuation of the analogue tradition. The essay concludes that the tradition of analogue cinema can be continued by cinema in the digital format when a digital motion picture combines the aesthetic and technical capabilities of the digital medium with traditional film grammar, such as meaningful montage or composition.

This essay for the inaugural issue of Technology and Language explores the notion of animatechnics in its two meanings: living technology and animal technology. On the one hand, there is a fiction or utopian component in this notion, on the other hand, it raises the question about technical life beyond the human: Can technology be alive-other than metaphorically? How does animal technical life work? These questions can be fused into one and suggest the notion not of the command but of the request as a technical operation.
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В этом эссе для первого выпуска журнала "Технологии в инфосфере" ("Technology and Language") ставится вопрос об аниматехнике, о двух возможных значениях этого термина: живые технологии и технологии животных. С одной стороны, в этом вопросе содержится элемент фикции и утопии, с другой стороны, он возникает как вопрос о технической жизни за пределами человеческого, об инструментальном поведении животных. Может ли техника-не метафорически-быть живой? Как устроена техническая сторона жизни животных? Две вопросительные линии соединяются этим эссе в один вопрос: в вопрос о просьбе как технической операции.

https://soctech.spbstu.ru/en/article/2020.1.12/

Što je svijest? Što znači osjećati bol ili percipirati crvenu boju? Misle li roboti i računala zaista? Ili biljke i amebe? Ako ikad susretnemo inteligentne izvanzemaljce, hoćemo li ih moći razumjeti? Filozofi i znanstvenici i dalje nisu u stanju odgovoriti na ta i slična pitanja. No možda to može znanstvena fantastika. Američki teoretičar Steven Shaviro u ovoj knjizi piše o znanstveno-fantastičnim romanima i pričama koje propituju ekstremne mogućnosti ljudske i neljudske svijesti i osjetilnosti.

Izdavač: Multimedijalni institut (Zagreb)
Organizator: Drugo more (Rijeka)

Dans le vidéo-clip que Chris Cunningham a réalisé pour la chanson de Bjork « All is full of love » (1999), l’américain Steven Shaviro analyse la façon dont la chanteuse se transforme en cyborg et la façon dont ce fantasme se réplique dans un autre cyborg, jouant sur la puissance du dédoublement dans ces corps machiniques devenus corps désirants. Devant ces mutations post-organiques, Shaviro évoque « la vie érotique des machines »  supposant un nouveau mode d’existence qui postule l’idée d’une peau technologique (affectée et émotive). Il ne s’agit pourtant pas seulement de transformation dans ces images, mais bien d’une fusion entre l’humain et son devenir-machinique. Shaviro reprend à son compte la question du désir et de la machine évoquée par Deleuze et Guattari dans L’anti-oedipe (1972) où il y aurait autant d’êtres vivants dans la machine que de machines dans les êtres vivants. La projection d’un fonctionnement organique de la machine via l’image et son dispositif, propose une interaction avec le spectateur laquelle intéresse moins Shaviro qui pointe son regard sur la question du double et son devenir-mutant. En proposant une approche phénoménologique des notions de virtuel et de possible – et en poussant ma lecture de Bergson en ce sens – je souhaite questionner à nouveaux frais l’opposition du couple actuel/virtuel. On le sait, Deleuze emprunte les notions de virtuel et de possible à Bergson qu’il conceptualise en ces termes dans Le Bergsonisme (1966) : « Le virtuel se distingue du possible, au moins de deux points de vue. D’un certain point de vue, en effet, le possible est le contraire du réel ; mais ce qui est tout à fait différent, le virtuel s’oppose à l’actuel ». Par conséquent, le possible devient un acte de déréalisation – la transformation de la réalité en un ensemble de possibles, aussi limités soit-ils à leur non-réalisation – là où le virtuel s’apparente à la potentialité – la différence, la divergence – plutôt qu’au possible. La virtualisation représente donc le mouvement inverse de l’actualisation en tant que dynamique symbolisant le passage de l’actuel au virtuel. Mais n’y a-t-il pas une certaine propension à rendre inerte l’affect du spectateur devant la distinction opérée entre virtuel et actuel ? Comme le remarque Mark Hansen dans son essai intitulé New Philosophy for New Media (2004) : « Pour étendre notre compréhension de l’affect chez Bergson en tant que base théorique dans notre exploration des nouveaux médias, nous devons la ‘racheter’ de l’appropriation transformatrice opérée par Deleuze. D’un point de vue général, cela nous obligera à défendre la base sensorimotrice du corps humain contre laquelle s’oppose Deleuze ». Hansen reproche au philosophe d’avoir désincarné la base sensorimotrice de l’affect, ce qui l’amène à travailler une position critique. En rapprochant le virtuel deleuzien de l’imagerie virtuelle des nouveaux médias, il suggère que certains dispositifs artistiques où les images sont rendues étranges par diverses manipulations, conduisent à une « virtualisation affective du corps » qui caractérise notre ouverture à autrui sur un mode déceptif. L’indifférence des créatures virtuelles proposées dans certaines images numériques provoque une frustration pour le spectateur, lequel semble lâcher prise avec l’espace-vécu. Pourtant, et si Hansen donne à l’image virtuelle ainsi actualisée le rôle d’une interface entre le numérique et l’affectif qui le rapproche de Deleuze, c’est bien pour proposer une lecture phénoménologique du « virtuel ». Ainsi, l’affection sensorimotrice subie par le spectateur se retrouve au centre de ses préoccupations : comment l’être humain peut-il habiter ces nouvelles images qui désincarnent au lieu d’incarner ? Pouvons-nous postuler de nouveaux systèmes d’incarnations qui feraient du virtuel un nouveau « corps phénoménal » (Merleau-Ponty) ? Devant l’échec à pouvoir nouer des relations authentiquement humaines face aux corps virtuels, nous restons pourtant un corps tissé d’intentions. Dès lors, il conviendrait d’interroger le « possible » non plus comme un réel fantomatique mais bien comme une puissance qui construit l’espace. Notre perception du virtuel se doit d’être pensé à partir de notre corps en tant qu’espace expressif par excellence. Par conséquent, comment situer les notions de virtuel et d’actuel du point de vue de la phénoménologie ? De quelle façon le virtuel des images numériques peut-il être le vecteur d’intentions qui invite à reconsidérer la façon dont voyons le monde ? Il nous faudra considérer le virtuel comme une présence qui incite à voir selon et avec les images et montrer en quoi les notions de réciprocité peuvent se substituer aux oppositions ontologiques.

Le collectif Entrepreneurs du commun s'est constitué en réponse au projet de construction d'un Monument aux victimes du communisme à Ottawa sur la colline parlementaire. Nous avons mis sur pied une exposition réunissant différentes propositions de « contre-monument aux victimes de la liberté » et un colloque interrogeant la portée des actes commémoratifs et leur rapport à l'imaginaire contemporain du commun. Ces deux événements ont eu lieu en septembre 2015 et constituent autant d'interventions politico-médiatiques dans le cadre de la campagne électorale canadienne. Le commun est généralement entendu comme ce qui résiste aux captures et appropriations par des intérêts privés. Pourquoi dès lors le nom de notre collectif comporte-t-il le mot potentiellement polémique et chargé d'opprobre d'entrepreneur? Cet article revient sur les différentes étapes du processus qui ont mené au choix de ce nom et sur la condition de l'artiste comme entrepreneur de soi.

The topic is the transcultural meaning of Enlightenment. I bring in a discussion of Object-Oriented Ontology to elucidate some things about Madhyamaka Buddhism, and develop a critique of post-Kantian Enlightenment based on Foucault, but heading off in the direction of evolutionary theory.

This essay proposes to explore a transcultural meaning of “Enlightenment” through an encounter between Madhyamaka Buddhism and contemporary critiques of Kantianism inspired by Object-Oriented Ontology. The concept of “translation-as-Enlightenment” in relation to the affective multitude of existence is explained in relation to ideas about causality, compassion, translation, aesthetics, epistemology and politics.

This project is framed in the recent turn to speculation in philosophy which aims to develop new ontologies that deprivilege the human and human cognition, in turn claiming the capacity of all entities to hold agency in experiential processes. New philosophical scholarship is seeing the resurgence of an old problematic within this turn: the ontological debate of substances vs. relations. The study is structured around these two positions, represented by Graham Harman's object-oriented  ontology  which  claims  the  essence  of  all  entities  and  Steven  Shaviro's understanding  of  relationality  through  Whitehead's  structure  of  experience  and  becoming, respectively. These two positions will help us situate the alternative metaphysics posited by media theorist Mark Hansen in regards to twenty-first-century media’s expansion of sensibility and  experiential  capacities.  His  analysis  of  contemporary  technologies  proposes  a  new interpretation  of  Whiteheadian  philosophy  that  inverts  the  common  understanding  of  his structure of experience. Hansen uses Whitehead to lay out a new post-phenomenology where twenty-first-century  media  have  access  to  expanded  levels  of  sensibility  beyond  human cognition and indeed have a central role from outside in the constitution of human experience. This investigation situates Hansen’s radicalization of Whitehead within this problematic and pinpoints  the  metaphysical  aspects  that  make  his  media  analysis  a  valid  contemporary alternative to rethink such ontological debate in the rise of the nonhuman. Most importantly, however,  it  is  to  think  politically  of  Hansen’s  paradigm  in  relation  to  new  contemporary debates about technocultural mediations of subjectivity in the context of worldly sensibility

At the basis of this study lies the observation that Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007) builds upon the uniquely media-aware formal strategies of an older film, Vanishing Point (Richard Sarafian, 1971), a cult classic of the car-chase genre. Drawing on the work of contemporary theorists of media and film, ranging from Steven Shaviro and Laura Mulvey to Caetlin Benson-Allott and Daniel Frampton, this essay argues for more nuanced accounts of mediality and nostalgia in the postcinematic era. I offer an in-depth reading of a micro-moment in Vanishing Point – a single visual effect which carries significant narrative, formal and medial implications – before laying out how this visual effect finds itself reworked into two separate scenes which frame the narrative of Death Proof . Going beyond widely-held interpretations that view Death Proof as grounded, primarily, in a sense of nostalgia for bygone film formats (celluloid) and narrative forms (the slasher film and the car-chase movie), this essay argues that, through its identification with Vanishing Point’s own awareness of itself as a multilayered medial text, Tarantino’s film builds upon and responds to Vanishing Point’s investment in a historical moment when recent and yet-to-come technological paradigm shifts existed as mere glimpses, as not-yet-actualized medial possibilities inscribed deeply within the structures of the film’s material body.

n this paper the visual identity of a post-communist estate in Poland and the role of memory and the remembering of the communist past are discussed. Phenomenological concepts derived from Paul Ricoeur and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are employed in the analysis of the post-communist identity of Cementownia, a community and place observed through the lens of a video camera. Through the interpretation of videoed perceptions of the place, interviews and staged recordings,
the performative work of memory is defined, while visual anthropology frames a reflection on ruination, which characterizes the condition of the community. Filmmaking
is applied here as a method and a critique of the schizophrenic position of post-communist societies, suspended between past and present and consequently between the discourse of capitalist advancement and the experience of
impoverishment. A self-reflective analysis will show that the process of transition from communism has resulted in social inequalities which relate to the political degradation of the meaning of a past alienated from the post-communist discourse of history.

The  purpose  of  this  article  is  to  put  some  light  on  Whitehead's  notion  of "concern".  This  notion,  introduced  in  his  late  works,  gives  a  new  ethical  tonality  to  his philosophy, but this ethical character of the notion is hard to grasp, given than the term does not work so much by conceptual denotation than it does by some vague connotation. This article suggests a way we may put this notion in the general perspective of Whitehead's scheme in order to understand this ethical value of concern. It starts by an account of Steven Shaviro’s paper on the notion of concern, which relates it to the interconnectedness of actual entities in order to explain how concern means a kind of affection. Then it confronts this notion of concern to one other aspect of Whitehead’s system: creativity. Once the part of creativity in the scheme is considered, the notion of concern appears to be marked by an element of fragility, which may help  understand  how  concern  does  not  only  mean  affection  but  also,  more  specifically, obligation to others.

Ao fío do libro "Groove: An Aesthetics of Measured Time", de Mark Abel, o filósofo Steven Shaviro fai neste artigo unha serie de reflexións sobre a teoría da música especialmente no que se refire ao emprego do ritmo e da medida, á súa vinculación co pensamento baseado na medición do tempo como valor e coa sociedade capitalista. De especial interese son as súas reflexións sobre a relación entre a música “clásica” contemporánea e a música denominada popular; a defensa desta última e os criterios empregados para xebrala da música composta ou interpretada con fins exclusivamente mercantís. Todo isto co pano de fondo da obra de Theodor W. Adorno, un dos grandes filósofos da música, e da crítica da sociedade tardomoderna como contexto.
Cunha reflexión singular sobre a relación entre tempo musical e tempo cronolóxico na Idade Moderna, Steven Shaviro analiza as múltiples funcións da música popular hoxe para deterse tamén no caso específico da música afrofuturista que ten por obxectivo criticar a situación actual da diáspora africana, revisando e cuestionando os acontecementos do pasado. A súa análise chega a formular a hipótese de como a música groove pode supoñer a liberación da escravitude métrica precisamente ao intensificar o ritmo, ao converter o presente eterno da sociedade tardomoderna nunha experiencia ateigada de instantaneidade, unha proposta teórica esbozada a partir da noción de Jetztzeit (tempo-actual, ou tempo-agora) de Walter Benjamin.

Homelessness poses a challenge to urban order that, if it is represented cinematically, can likewise influence the modes of filmic representations of the city. In this essay, I argue that film is a spatial and corporeal form of representation that partakes in the construction and organisation of urban space. In that respect, the focus on characters that are usually excluded from dominant representations of the cityscape offers a subversive renegotiation of common representations of the city. In my analysis of Lenny Abrahamson’s film Adam & Paul, I will demonstrate how the film challenges common cinematic constructions of Dublin as a progressive city during the economically successful Celtic Tiger years by focussing on two homeless protagonists and their abject bodily presence in the cityscape.