The Fall of the House of Usher
Posted by | Anonymous | 24.8.10 | 6 Comments
"His opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization."
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24/8/10 13:21
I've been filling time at my crushingly pointless new job listening to audio books, mostly Nietzsche and Lovecraft. With Lovecraft it's been so much fun reading (listening) to fiction and wanting to take down notes for philosophical reasons. Graham Harman has a book due next year about Lovecraft and philosophy. I saw a call for papers recently on Philip K. Dick and philosophy too.
26/8/10 03:06
on philip k dick i'd like to write a paper about a scanner darkly. that book explores some great themes: drug culture; pharmetucical companies; multiple personalities and deep cover spies; identity and conception of reality; surveilance culture.... the list goes on! awesome book, u guys read it?
26/8/10 04:27
No, I haven't read that one. I saw that film they made of it a few years ago, which was okay.
Incidentally, I just ordered a collection of Philip K Dick novels from Amazon, using my new Amazon Prime account.
As for the Philip K Dick and Philosophy book ... I'm usually derisive of the X and Philosophy series, but for PKD I might make an exception.
26/8/10 04:48
on the X and philosophy check out 'Memento' edited by andrew Kania and 'The Thin Red Line' edited by David Davies.
both avoid the drivel that some film and philosophy becomes soaked in. both are attempts to read the film as doing philosophy rather than reading the film through philosophical tinted glasses - eg. watching dawn of dead from a deleuzian point of view.
in fact a lot of the thin red line book is rejecting emphatic heideggerian readings of the film. instead it is suggested that a good philosophical film cannot be reduced in the same way that a good philosophical text can never be fully digested and explained.
also
apparently there is a call out for "inception and philosophy" papers... we will have to see whether the film can rise through the ridiculous frameworks people will envitably try to yoke it to. whats the worst you think of? off the top of my head... marx...
just think, somewhere out there, some idiot out there is trying to tie "the dictatorship of the proletriate" to the scene where leo's subconcsious attacks that girl for making the floor the ceiling... bastard.
26/8/10 05:05
Yes, I saw the Inception and Philosophy CFP.
The most obvious reading is surely a Freudian or Lacanian one, no?
26/8/10 05:27
true, or perhaps Jung and his collective unconscious - which could be argued to be the place where the dream sequences take place or where they end up when they fall through to that place of waves crashing on the beach. and jung's theory of archetypes is also pertinent
also, deleuze and guattari's conception of neurophilosophy where the "mind" is a phase-space area of bizarre escher-esque dimensions. concepts moving at infinite speeds and crashing into each other sounds a lot to me like the planting of the idea, the inception, that they attempt...
and yet i've done exactly what i just railed against ive put a framework over the film and warped into saying something wholly other than what the film is. by doing this its not a reading of the film as it is, or what it might actually be trying to say. rather it is reading the film as an appendage and therefore belittles what is there. it takes minor thoughts (or in the worst cases, something that isn't even there! and is just slapped on haphazardly by some theorist desperate for someone else to agree with him) and expands it through some superfluous theory to detriment of the original thing (in this case the film-itself).