Description
Book SynopsisIn this important new book, the leading cultural theorist and philosopher Bernard Stiegler re-examines the relationship between politics and aesthetics in our contemporary hyperindustrial age.
Stiegler argues that our epoch is characterized by the seizure of the symbolic by industrial technology, where aesthetics has become both theatre and weapon in an economic war. This has resulted in a symbolic misery' where conditioning substitutes for experience. In today's control societies, aesthetic weapons play an essential role: audiovisual and digital technologies have become a means of controlling the conscious and unconscious rhythms of bodies and souls, of modulating the rhythms of consciousness and life. The notion of an aesthetic engagement, capable of founding a new communal sensibility and a genuine aesthetic community, has largely collapsed today. This is because the overwhelming majority of the population is now totally subjected to the aesthetic conditioning of market
Trade Review"In this decisive contribution to a critical understanding of contemporary life, Stiegler demonstrates how mass exclusion from cultural production constitutes a form of generalized impoverishment, threatening to reduce our existence to mere subsistence. Typically though, he also suggests how we might build alternatives to this 'symbolic misery'. This work forms a vital part of Stiegler's essential project."
Martin Crowley, Queen�s College, University of Cambridge "Expanding on Deleuze�s idea of 'control societies', Bernard Stiegler provocatively diagnoses the 'misery' of contemporary society as a collective exclusion from the creation of symbols. A war is being waged, he argues: capitalistic marketing is the instrument of choice, the battleground is aesthetics and the fight is for the control of affect. Recommended for anyone interested in the contemporary cultural condition."
N. Katherine Hayles, Duke UniversityTable of ContentsForeword
Of Symbolic Misery, the Control of Affects, and the Shame that Follows
As Though We Were Lacking or How to Find Weapons in Alain Resnais’s Same Old Song
Allegory of the Anthill
The Loss of Individuation in the Hyper-industrial Age
Tiresias and the War of Time
On a Film by Bertrand Bonello
Afterword
