Anthony Curtis Adler
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823270798
- eISBN:
- 9780823270842
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823270798.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
Taking its departure from a phenomenological encounter with television—indeed a rethinking of the phenomenological method in terms of the way in which the experience of television disarticulates ...
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Taking its departure from a phenomenological encounter with television—indeed a rethinking of the phenomenological method in terms of the way in which the experience of television disarticulates life, opposing my life to the life that is not mine to live and yet mine not to live—this book attempts to illuminate the ontology of late capitalism, focusing on celebrity culture and the rise of the pluripotent gadget. While Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein in Being and Time will serve as the starting point, the theorization of the gadget in particular proceeds by means of bringing Heidegger’s ontology into dialogue with the Marxist theory of the commodity and Althusser’s treatment of ideology. Gadget-commodity-life will come to be understood in terms of a reproduction of the “alethic,” rather than merely ideological, conditions of production. For production to remain possible it will become increasingly necessary to have the commodity itself “stage” the play of concealment-unconcealment as the ontological basis of production. Whereas the first part of this book develops a theoretical frame work through a sustained argument, the second part will attempt to “screen” television, celebrity, and gadget-commodity-life itself through a series of fragmentary theoretical encounters. These will attempt, moreover, to show how the pop-culture objects of late capitalism exist only through the possibility of a theoretical encounter with them—or, in other words, exist as phenomenological.Less
Taking its departure from a phenomenological encounter with television—indeed a rethinking of the phenomenological method in terms of the way in which the experience of television disarticulates life, opposing my life to the life that is not mine to live and yet mine not to live—this book attempts to illuminate the ontology of late capitalism, focusing on celebrity culture and the rise of the pluripotent gadget. While Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein in Being and Time will serve as the starting point, the theorization of the gadget in particular proceeds by means of bringing Heidegger’s ontology into dialogue with the Marxist theory of the commodity and Althusser’s treatment of ideology. Gadget-commodity-life will come to be understood in terms of a reproduction of the “alethic,” rather than merely ideological, conditions of production. For production to remain possible it will become increasingly necessary to have the commodity itself “stage” the play of concealment-unconcealment as the ontological basis of production. Whereas the first part of this book develops a theoretical frame work through a sustained argument, the second part will attempt to “screen” television, celebrity, and gadget-commodity-life itself through a series of fragmentary theoretical encounters. These will attempt, moreover, to show how the pop-culture objects of late capitalism exist only through the possibility of a theoretical encounter with them—or, in other words, exist as phenomenological.
Anthony Curtis Adler
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823270798
- eISBN:
- 9780823270842
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823270798.003.0012
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
Returning to and reprising the slogan of phenomenology—”back to the things themselves”— this chapter marks the transition to the second part. Repeating the major themes of the first part of this ...
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Returning to and reprising the slogan of phenomenology—”back to the things themselves”— this chapter marks the transition to the second part. Repeating the major themes of the first part of this book, it will seek to catch the drifts, waves, eddies, and swells that arise as the furtive combinations and clandestine assemblages of the truth-play of gadget commodity-life.Less
Returning to and reprising the slogan of phenomenology—”back to the things themselves”— this chapter marks the transition to the second part. Repeating the major themes of the first part of this book, it will seek to catch the drifts, waves, eddies, and swells that arise as the furtive combinations and clandestine assemblages of the truth-play of gadget commodity-life.
Anthony Curtis Adler
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823270798
- eISBN:
- 9780823270842
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823270798.003.0011
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter argues that Althusser’s theorization of the reproduction of the ideological conditions of production must be taken even further to encompass what will be called the alethic conditions of ...
More
This chapter argues that Althusser’s theorization of the reproduction of the ideological conditions of production must be taken even further to encompass what will be called the alethic conditions of production. If production is of essence alethic—the bringing forth of an entity into unconcealment—then it must itself be capable of producing and reproducing its own mode of alethic productivity. In other words, production must bring forth its own alethic horizontality. This is the “work” of the gadget: the gadget is the commodity that has taken alethic production upon itself. The gadget brings with it its own world, even its own Dasein. Or rather, and more precisely, it appropriates our world, our existence, our very being, the being that has its being to be, our authenticity and inauthenticity, our temporality, our moods and disclosedness and truth, perhaps even televisionary Dasein itself—even the life that is not ours to live.Less
This chapter argues that Althusser’s theorization of the reproduction of the ideological conditions of production must be taken even further to encompass what will be called the alethic conditions of production. If production is of essence alethic—the bringing forth of an entity into unconcealment—then it must itself be capable of producing and reproducing its own mode of alethic productivity. In other words, production must bring forth its own alethic horizontality. This is the “work” of the gadget: the gadget is the commodity that has taken alethic production upon itself. The gadget brings with it its own world, even its own Dasein. Or rather, and more precisely, it appropriates our world, our existence, our very being, the being that has its being to be, our authenticity and inauthenticity, our temporality, our moods and disclosedness and truth, perhaps even televisionary Dasein itself—even the life that is not ours to live.
Anthony Curtis Adler
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823270798
- eISBN:
- 9780823270842
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823270798.003.0015
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
It’s bicycle repairman…; Dialectica gizmotica; The Trojan horse; The personal computer; Terror-vision; The Joker; Gigi Nip/Tuck; The Following; The Ring; House; Disjecta membra; Dexteri; Boogie ...
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It’s bicycle repairman…; Dialectica gizmotica; The Trojan horse; The personal computer; Terror-vision; The Joker; Gigi Nip/Tuck; The Following; The Ring; House; Disjecta membra; Dexteri; Boogie Nights; Man or Muppet; The sweatshops of Hollywood; Muppetation and mediation; Demectomy; Action figures; Liberal Arts; Glee; Bunheads; Breaking Bad/Elective AffinitiesLess
It’s bicycle repairman…; Dialectica gizmotica; The Trojan horse; The personal computer; Terror-vision; The Joker; Gigi Nip/Tuck; The Following; The Ring; House; Disjecta membra; Dexteri; Boogie Nights; Man or Muppet; The sweatshops of Hollywood; Muppetation and mediation; Demectomy; Action figures; Liberal Arts; Glee; Bunheads; Breaking Bad/Elective Affinities
Wayne C. Myrvold
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780198865094
- eISBN:
- 9780191897481
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198865094.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Logic/Philosophy of Mathematics
The invocation of probabilistic considerations in physics often involves, implicitly or explicitly, some notion of relative sizes, or measures, of sets of possibilities. In equilibrium statistical ...
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The invocation of probabilistic considerations in physics often involves, implicitly or explicitly, some notion of relative sizes, or measures, of sets of possibilities. In equilibrium statistical mechanics, certain standard measures are introduced explicitly. It is often said that these measures are “natural,” in some sense. This chapter explores what that could mean. It does so by means of a toy example, a fictitious machine that I call the parabola gadget. The dynamics of the parabola gadget pick out a measure on the space of states of the gadget that other measures converge towards. In this sense, that measure is a natural one to use for systems that have been evolving freely long enough for the requisite washing-out of disagreements among input distributions to have taken place. We have good reason to think that the standard measures evoked in equilibrium statistical mechanics are of this sort One upshot of this is that this notion of standard measure is of no use for making judgments about probability or improbability of conditions in the early universe.Less
The invocation of probabilistic considerations in physics often involves, implicitly or explicitly, some notion of relative sizes, or measures, of sets of possibilities. In equilibrium statistical mechanics, certain standard measures are introduced explicitly. It is often said that these measures are “natural,” in some sense. This chapter explores what that could mean. It does so by means of a toy example, a fictitious machine that I call the parabola gadget. The dynamics of the parabola gadget pick out a measure on the space of states of the gadget that other measures converge towards. In this sense, that measure is a natural one to use for systems that have been evolving freely long enough for the requisite washing-out of disagreements among input distributions to have taken place. We have good reason to think that the standard measures evoked in equilibrium statistical mechanics are of this sort One upshot of this is that this notion of standard measure is of no use for making judgments about probability or improbability of conditions in the early universe.
