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A Deleuzian reading of Whitehead and a Whiteheadian reading of Deleuze open the possibility of a critical aesthetics of contemporary culture. In Without Criteria, Steven Shaviro proposes and explores a philosophical fantasy: imagine a world in which Alfred North Whitehead takes the place of Martin Heidegger. What if Whitehead, instead of Heidegger, had set the agenda for postmodern thought? Heidegger asks, “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” Whitehead asks, “How is it that there is always something new?” In a world where everything from popular music to DNA is being sampled and recombined, argues Shaviro, Whitehead's question is the truly urgent one. Without Criteria is Shaviro's experiment in rethinking postmodern theory, especially the theory of aesthetics, from a point of view that hearkens back to Whitehead rather than Heidegger. In working through the ideas of Whitehead and Deleuze, Shaviro also appeals to Kant, arguing that certain aspects of Kant's thought pave the way for the philosophical “constructivism” embraced by both Whitehead and Deleuze. Kant, Whitehead, and Deleuze are not commonly grouped together, but the juxtaposition of them in Without Criteria helps to shed light on a variety of issues that are of concern to contemporary art and media practices.

Music videos today sample and rework a century's worth of movies and other pop culture artifacts to offer a plethora of visions and sounds that we have never encountered before.As these videos have proliferated online, they have become more widely accessible than ever before. InDigital Music Videos, Steven Shaviro examines the ways that music videos interact with and change older media like movies and gallery art; the use of technologies like compositing, motion control, morphing software, and other digital special effects in order to create a new organization of time and space; how artists use music videos to project their personas; and how less well known musicians use music videos to extend their range and attract attention.Surveying a wide range of music videos, Shaviro highlights some of their most striking innovations while illustrating how these videos are creating a whole new digital world for the music industry.

From the rediscovery of Alfred North Whitehead's work to the rise of new materialist thought, including object-oriented ontology, there has been a rapid turn toward speculation in philosophy as a way of moving beyond solely human perceptions of nature and existence. Now Steven Shaviro maps this quickly emerging speculative realism, which is already dramatically influencing how we interpret reality and our place in a universe in which humans are not the measure of all things. The Universe of Thingsexplores the common insistence of speculative realism on a noncorrelationist thought: that things or objects exist apart from how our own human minds relate to and comprehend them. Shaviro focuses on how Whitehead both anticipates and offers challenges to prevailing speculative realist thought, moving between Whitehead's own panpsychism, Harman's object-oriented ontology, and the reductionist eliminativism of Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier. The stakes of this recent speculative realist thought-of the effort to develop new ways of grasping the world-are enormous as it becomes clear that our inherited assumptions are no longer adequate to describe, much less understand, the reality we experience around us. As Shaviro acknowledges, speculative realist thought has its dangers, but it also, like the best speculative fiction, holds the potential to liberate us from confining views of what is outside ourselves and, he believes, to reclaim aesthetics and beauty as a principle of life itself. Bringing together a wide array of contemporary thought, and evenhandedly assessing its current debates,The Universe of Thingsis an invaluable guide to the evolution of speculative realism and the provocation of Alfred North Whitehead's pathbreaking work.

This book offers a manifesto for a radical existentialism aiming to regenerate the place of the outside that contemporary theory underestimates. Neyrat calls this outside \"atopia\": not utopia, a dreamt place out of the world where everything would be perfect, but atopia, the internal outside that is at the core of every being. Atopia is neither an object that an \"object-oriented ontology\" would be able to formalize, nor the matter that \"new materialisms\" could identify. Atopia is what constitutes the existence of any object or subject, its singularity or more precisely its \"eccentricity.\" Etymologically, to exist means \"to be outside\" and the book argues that every entity is outside, thrown in the world, wandering without any ontological anchor. In this regard, a radicalized existentialism does not privilege human beings (as Sartre and Heidegger did), but considers existence as a universal condition that concerns every being.It is important to offer a radical existentialism because the current denial of the outside is politically, and aesthetically, damaging. Only an atopian philosophy—a bizarre, extravagant, heretic philosophy—can care for our fear of the outside. For therapeutic element, a radical existentialism favors everything that challenges the compact immanence in which we are trapped, losing capacity to imagine political alternatives. To sustain these alternatives, the book identifies the atopia as a condition of the possibility to break immanence and analyze these breaks in human and animal subjectivity, language, politics and metaphysics.

Connected is made up of a series of mini-essays—on cyberpunk, hip-hop, film noir, Web surfing, greed, electronic surveillance, pervasive multimedia, psychedelic drugs, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary psychology, among other topics. In this breathtaking work, Steven Shaviro investigates popular culture, new technologies, political change, and community disruption and concludes that science fiction and social reality have become virtually indistinguishable.

The old scholarly model of peer review, extensive revision, and long delays for print publication is no longer valid in the Internet age. A film like the late Tony Scott's Domino (2005) features a violently restless, almost ADD-like editing style, with continual minor adjustments of perspective, reframings via jump cuts and stuttering repetitions, and overlays of heterogeneous image and sound sources.