The official world
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Bibliographic Information
The official world
Duke University Press, 2016
- : hardcover
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [261]-274) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In his virtuosic new book noted cultural critic Mark Seltzer shows how suspense, as art form and form of life, depicts and shapes the social systems that organize our modern world. Modernity's predicament, Seltzer writes, is a society so hungry for reality that it cannot stop describing itself, and that makes for a world that continuously establishes itself by staging its own conditions. Employing the social theories of Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, Niklas Luhmann, and Peter Sloterdijk, Seltzer shows how suspense novels, films, and performance art by Patricia Highsmith, Tom McCarthy, Cormac McCarthy, J. G. Ballard, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and others outline how we currently live and reveal the stress-points and mood-systems of the modern epoch. In its focus on social games, depictions of violent and explosive persons, along with its cast of artists, reporters, detectives, and others who observe and report and reenact, the suspense mode creates and recreates modern systems of action and autonomy, and defines the self-turned world's practices and aesthetics. By epitomizing a reflexive, self-legislating, and autonomous world, a suspense art with humans in the systems epoch provides the models and sets the rules for our modern, official world.
Table of Contents
Part I. The Daily Planet
1. Introduction to the Official World 3
2. Brecht's Rabbit: The Anthropotechnics of Suspense 25
Part II. Stationary Carousels and Chain Letters: The Ego-Technic Media of the Official World
3. "The Proper Study of Interaction" 47
4. Chain Letters 61
Part III. "Social Games": Playing Our Part in the Systems Epoch
5. Parlor Games 83
6. The Natural History of Artificial Life 109
Part IV. Suspended Worlds: Men in Self-Curved Space
7. The Wall of the World 127
8. Marching in Files 142
Part V. News from the Outside
9. The Turn Turn 163
10. A Postscript on the Official World 178
Acknowledgments 199
Notes 201
Bibliography 261
Index 275
by "Nielsen BookData"