Duke University Press, 2024 Cloth: 978-1-4780-2585-6 | Paper: 978-1-4780-3011-9 | eISBN: 978-1-4780-5912-7 Library of Congress Classification BH39.M3966 2024
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In The Fold, Laura U. Marks offers a practical philosophy and aesthetic theory for living in an infinitely connected cosmos. Drawing on the theories of Leibniz, Glissant, Deleuze, and theoretical physicist David Bohm—who each conceive of the universe as being folded in on itself in myriad ways—Marks contends that the folds of the cosmos are entirely constituted of living beings. From humans to sandwiches to software to stars, every entity is alive and occupies its own private enclosure inside the cosmos. Through analyses of fiction, documentary and experimental movies, interactive media, and everyday situations, Marks outlines embodied methods for detecting and augmenting the connections between each living entity and the cosmos. She shows that by affectively mediating with the ever-shifting folded relations within the cosmos, it is possible to build “soul-assemblages” that challenge information capitalism, colonialism, and other power structures and develop new connections with the infinite. With this guide for living within the enfolded and unfolding cosmos, Marks teaches readers to richly apprehend the world and to trace the processes of becoming that are immanent within the fold.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Laura U. Marks is Grant Strate University Professor at Simon Fraser University and author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, also published by Duke University Press, and Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image, among other books.
REVIEWS
“A remarkable book on a truly fascinating concept, the fold, implicate order, cosmology, soul or belonging-together, that addresses how we can understand the connectedness of what is and will become, and represent, create—and enjoy—this immersion in relations that link everything to every other thing. This is a book that identifies politics, subjectivity, and human life as some among the many folds of a universe of ever-expanding orders of entwinement.”
-- Elizabeth Grosz, author of The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism
“In The Fold Laura U. Marks offers a radical new way of understanding aesthetics and our affective encounter with the world. Through her unique and inspiring voice and the evolution of her larger intellectual project over the decades, she takes readers to a different place from which to reconceive their quotidian engagement with art and life more broadly. This paradigm-shifting work will be a touchstone book for the field.”
-- David Martin-Jones, author of Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii 1. Living in a Folded Cosmos 1 2. Soul-Assemblages 38 3. Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics: A Triadic Model of the Cosmos 78 4. The Information Fold 99 5. Training Perception and Affection 144 6. The Feelings of Fabulation 164 7. Monad, Database, Remix: Manners of Unfolding in The Last Angel of History 194 8. The Monad Next Door 220 Conclusion: Recognizing Other Edges 243 Notes 253 Bibliography 281 Index 307
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