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Hysteria and Democracy: Exfoliating Difference in Lynne Tillman’s American Genius, A Comedy

[…]The anxieties about the human body that the film dramatizes seem best understood within the critical parameters provided by Mark Seltzer, whom Auerbach cites: “Early cinema’s chase film at the turn of the last century thus represents one important example of what Mark Seltzer has called naturalist dramas of uncertain agency wherein ‘the principle of locomotion which in liberal market culture is the sign of agency is in machine culture the sign of automatism'” (807). Though Auerbach invokes Seltzer’s analysis to suggest that the genre of the chase film represents nothing so much as anxiety about agency, much of Auerbach’s […]
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In Praise of “In Praise of Overreading”

[…]of dialogue. First of all, then, Derrida’s method, Davis argues, is to apply a “sufficient critical pressure” to a text to result in a “disruptive semantic excess” (28) – and note how Davis’ title (Critical Excess) has been severed, or spread out, or disseminated, into his characterization of Derrida’s method. If Derrida sees his work as a “duel of singularities”, of reading and writing, that he “writes toward … the event of another text” … literature “names something that cannot be contained by rules and principles” (29); and while the text demands “absolute fidelity,” there’s always a remainder (Lacan’s objet […]

Late Light in the House of Sounds: Joseph McElroy’s Night Soul and Other Stories

[…]using what others have said to think through what is happening at the moment. The player is working out what has happened in life, not dwelling on the past but reworking it like “a jump of memory answering answer” (260). If “the beat is all” it’s because it is the measure as a man composing is the measurer of all things, and working out the details in his work the jazz player begins to tell a story and hint at the title the piece he’s working which will be given by an unknown woman later at a club, “Coastline”: The […]
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Finding the Human in “the messy, contingent, emergent mix of the material world”: Embodiment, Place, and Materiality in Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures

[…]also links to a 37,000-page archive of chemical industry documents assembled by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a group that also operates the Human Toxome Project’s “Mapping the Pollution in People.” Links to this project provide users with a catalogue of particular toxicants found in human bodies all over the world. The project couples this chemical data with detailed portraits of real people who have tested positive for various toxicants and chemicals. Alaimo argues that such electronic literatures combine scientific data, medical narratives, and political calls to action to provide new practice of meaning-making for ordinary experts to use in […]
Read more » Finding the Human in “the messy, contingent, emergent mix of the material world”: Embodiment, Place, and Materiality in Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures

Review of Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

[…]of the environmental justice movement in the early twentieth century. Alaimo examines Le Sueur’s working-class politics through recurring images of humans joined with the earth as a critique of and resistance to capitalist exploitation. While she notes Le Sueur’s challenge to gender tropes in her vision of a masculine nature and feminine desire, Alaimo comments that Le Sueur’s “enthusiasm for a kind of maternal, proletarian vitality betrays exactly the sort of essentialism that mires the (reproductive) female body within the relentless fecundity of nature” (38). That said, Alaimo’s close reading of Le Sueur’s article, “Women Know a Lot of Things,” […]
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Critical Code Studies Conference – Week Four Discussion

In Week 4, Critical Code Studies contributors kept the magic alive as they discussed Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s “On Sourcery and Source Codes,” the first chapter of her forthcoming Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Informed by Chun’s psychoanalytic reading and her awareness of the materiality of code work, the conversation deals with fetishism, gender, genetics, and performativity in ways both abstract and tangible. Week 4 of the CCS discussion began with a reading from the first chapter of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s recent book, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. We are grateful to MIT Press for allowing us to share […]
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Critical Code Studies Conference – Week Four Introduction

[…]open up spaces of discovery. Nevertheless, it was our shared text for Week 4 of the Critical Code Studies Working Group – Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s first chapter from her forthcoming book Programmed Visions: Software and Memory – that challenged me to rethink the anecdote of my dad’s fingertips in relationship to notions of ritual and magic that undergird so much of our technological practice. In this chapter, Chun introduces the term “sourcery” to signify what she sees as contemporary culture’s fetishism of source code. Software (source code), Chun claims, “is a magical force that promises to bring together the […]
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“You are cordially invited to a / CHEMICAL WEDDING”: Metamorphiction and Experimentation in Jeff Noon’s Cobralingus

[…]wedding invitation in the next interim text (Fig. 9): The wedding invitation is framed by DNA code which, through its distinctive detachment from the invitation itself, gestures back to the two paradoxical dialectics. That is, the disconnected DNA codes are visual representations of signifiers which may be floating, flickering, or both. Hayles argues that “mutation is crucial because it names the bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the system to evolve in a new direction. It reveals the productive potential of randomness that is also recognized within information theory when uncertainty is seen as both […]
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See the Strings: Watchmen and the Under-Language of Media

[…]– can do full justice to the under-language of Watchmen. As indicated, this comic delivers not a working timepiece but something more like a catastrophe simulator, an open-ended experiment that the reader is invited or expected to perform. Understanding Watchmen in this light makes it seem distinctly avant la lettre, something impossible to describe in traditional terms. More than the relic of an older, spatial way of seeing, it prefigures and perhaps inaugurates the next thing in sign systems. In this century we are beginning to build on our technologies of recording and inscription new media and new language that […]
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How to Fail (at) Fiction and Influence Everybody: A Review of Penthouse-F by Richard Kalich

[…]and reader, between the codes given by a text and the choices readers make in interpreting those codes. At times, the writing of Penthouse-F signals a kind of literary seriousness, in prose that attains to the tradition the book so clearly cherishes. Describing an act of warmth and contact with his captives (a foot massage), Kalich muses, “An even greater sense of power and erotic command enveloped me as I observed the girl’s imploring, pleading eyes begging that I do the same for the boy, asking nothing for himself, but rather only for the girl” (178). Yet the text undermines […]
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