The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos

by Laura U. Marks

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478025856
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	04/05/2024
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Laura U. Marks is Grant Strate UniversityProfessor at Simon Fraser Universityand author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, also published by Duke UniversityPress, and Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image, among other books.

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

Editorial Reviews

"Her ideas do grapple across schools, but also geographic locations, time zones, intangible and tangible things that exist, and maybe even some that don’t exist. Corporeal realities, animal realities. Across disciplines, across minds. It’s a refreshing look at what a collection of ideas through one academic lens can look like, and how we can and should appreciate it."
 

British Columbia Review - Thomas Girard

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.

Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History - David Martin-Jones

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.

The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism - Elizabeth Grosz