The Fold is a book of practical philosophy about living in a folded cosmos. Because it begins with the body and the senses, this philosophy is an aesthetics, which I call enfolding-unfolding aesthetics. It proposes a theory of mediation as contact and connection and offers a set of embodied methods for detecting cosmic connections. Key thinkers that contribute to this concept of the folded cosmos include German 18th C philosopher G.F.W. Leibniz, British quantum physicist David Bohm, and Martinican poet-philosopher Édouard Glissant.
I suggest that the folded substance that constitutes the cosmos is composed of everything and everyone, all of us living beings. I argue that living beings include from humans to particles, sandwiches to stars, and thoughts and images too. I argue we compose and recompose in ever-shifting assemblages. Introducing the concept of the soul-assemblage, The Fold suggests ways to strengthen connections to the cosmos.
My cosmology includes human-made entities, which allows for more analysis of culture and of power relations. Thus I engage extensively with contemporary thinkers of culture and technology in the age of information capitalism. I propose ways to counter the dominance of information folds by “unfolding differently.”
The Fold’s philosophical, embodied, and cosmic journey is accompanied by numerous movies that act as hosts and thought-companions, as well as beguiling diagrams.
An excerpt, "Soul-assemblages--from your body to the cosmos," is on the Selected Writings page.
six monads in an open cosmos
Here's the table of contents:
Living in a Folded Cosmos
Riding a common wave — The goal of life in the folded cosmos — Bus-stop philosophy — Monism — Leibniz, Carr, Deleuze: being a monad, being a microcosm — Bohm: the implicate order — Glissant: history enfolds relations, relations enfold history — Only a model — Chapters to come
Soul-Assemblages
Boundedness, or ensouled matter — What rocks know — Naming souls — Soul-assemblages — Disquiet — The vinculum, the dominated monad, and the soul-assemblage — Object or monad? — Singularities, local manifolds, and unfolding differently — The open cosmos — The politics of folds — From your navel to the stars: cosmic soul-assemblages
The Information Fold
Information flows, modulates, reinforces, and disperses — Information and capital — Information arises to a point of view — Information-images and computational perception — Information models the future on abstractions of the present — What information enfolds — Taking the shape of information — Information’s toxic materiality — Unfolding differently — Stay under the radar? — Only moderately paranoid — Cinema of folds — Unfolding differently with algorithmic media — Collapse informatics and small-footprint aesthetics — Media soul-assemblages
Invisible Media (2003)
Enfolding/unfolding — War and invisibility — Experience : Information/Capital : Image
Aesthetics: Training perception and affection
Artworks connect the body to the cosmos – Embodied methods — Affective analysis: a method — Case study: “Can anyone really register trauma?” — Case study: Workshopping for ideas
A Noisy Brush with the Infinite
Media are connective tissue — Recap of enfolding-unfolding aesthetics — The infinite and noise — Information and noise — Informed material — Virtue of noise — The noisy potato — What to unfold
The Feelings of Fabulation
Powers of the false — Fabulation: a method — Real-time fabulation — Fabulation begins at home — Feeling fabulation — Fabulation and the great refusal
I Feel Like an Abstract Line
Feeling like an abstract line, circa 1900 — Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther-Thomson feel like abstract lines — Kinaesthetic empathy with kinaesthesia — And when empathy is colonized by information?
Thinking Like a Carpet, Feeling Like a Pixel
The interval: perception of a point — Being algorithmic — Carpets imagine the cosmos — Feeling like a carpet — Living algorithms — Azadeh Emadi: Feeling like a pixel
Monad, Database, Remix: Manners of Unfolding in The Last Angel of History
Unfolding new embodiments — Unfolding from ruins — Aniconism: refusing to unfold — Unfolding from a database — Montage: unfolding from monads — Unfolding counter-discursive fragments — Fabulation: inventing folds — Unfolding deep time — Unfolding as remix
Information, Secrets, and Enigmas: An Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics for Cinema
Shapes of information, shapes of conspiracy — Forces of folding and unfolding — Earth of endless secrets — Inexhaustible enigma
The Monad Next Door
Answers for monado-skeptics — The monad enfolds the cosmos — The soul’s reading room — Disquiet: the monad’s body — Upstairs and downstairs — The monad’s guts — Monads and their bodies in Neighboring Sounds — The monad’s mortgage
Conclusion: Recognizing Other Edges
