Thinking Media

What happens when forms fall apart? And how can modern literature and contemporary audio-visual arts rethink the theoretical potential of deformations through the affective agency of aesthetic forms? Contributing to the current interdisciplinary dialogue between cultural affect studies, media philosophy, and literary theory, this book explores the performative agency of affects and argues for a novel concept of disformations that involves affective operations based on the generative deformation of forms. To do so, Disformations undertakes a close reading of four broadly construed intermedia figures which exceed their contextual framing and media boundaries stretched out between Rococo engravings, modernist fictions, contemporary video art, and posthuman visual experiments-the faceless face, the wallpaper pattern, the garbage dump, and the empty chair. By linking the disturbances to form with the formal work of mutually interacting affects, the works of writers and artists, including Vincent van Gogh, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gaston Leroux, Richard Weiner, Michel Tournier, Ingmar Bergman, Francis Bacon, Eug ne Ionesco, Vladimir Nabokov, Michal Pechoucek, Joseph Kosuth, Jan Ser ch, among others, open up a new avenue for addressing the aesthetic forms that reach the limits of representation. Grounded in the affective operations of shattering, saturating, revaluating, and shifting, which desubjectify affects in favor of mobilizing their mediality and performative qualities, the mediaphilosophical framework and various close readings of this book offer a fresh inquiry into not only how artistic media produce their own figural thinking but also how they compel us to think with them.