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Reading the Way of Things: Towards a New Technology of Making Sense
A Deleuzian guide to reading the world, Reading the Way of Things is an exploration of the ideas of McLuhan, Deleuze, Guattari, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Burroughs, and more. It is a book that aims at getting the reader past teleological interpretations and questions, letting the reader in on new ways of doing criticism as well as new ways of going, being, and thinking.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
160 pages, Paperback
Published August 26, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 26, 2017
How to analyze art and not be a twat the handbook
July 4, 2017
This is an interesting book. You could call it a crash course in phenomenology, it's certainly far less tedious than sitting through conferences on the subject.
The central idea is very simple to explain, reading, experiencing an artwork is to be at one with an artwork and each reading is a new experience, you must go with the text, let it take you to new places.
And that's about it, sure there's a mention for two of this or than post modern philosopher, a few interesting asides about cultural phenomena (though I would have liked a heavier leaning on McLuhan and his school). It spans just over a hundred pages, it can be hard going not because the next itself is hard, but the nature of the text is very repetitive, it often feels like you're reading the same sentence over and over again, which in a round about way is kind of the point.
This isn't a book laden with facts, that will tell you something new about the world, it is very much a book in the "how to see" rather than "what is it" school. I wouldn't necessary call it 'thought provoking' as much as it is 'ethics provoking', indeed towards the end Coffeen admits what he is essentially writing about is rhetoric itself.
It's a very worthy book, well worth reading and I can easily see myself revisiting it at some point in the near future.
The central idea is very simple to explain, reading, experiencing an artwork is to be at one with an artwork and each reading is a new experience, you must go with the text, let it take you to new places.
And that's about it, sure there's a mention for two of this or than post modern philosopher, a few interesting asides about cultural phenomena (though I would have liked a heavier leaning on McLuhan and his school). It spans just over a hundred pages, it can be hard going not because the next itself is hard, but the nature of the text is very repetitive, it often feels like you're reading the same sentence over and over again, which in a round about way is kind of the point.
This isn't a book laden with facts, that will tell you something new about the world, it is very much a book in the "how to see" rather than "what is it" school. I wouldn't necessary call it 'thought provoking' as much as it is 'ethics provoking', indeed towards the end Coffeen admits what he is essentially writing about is rhetoric itself.
It's a very worthy book, well worth reading and I can easily see myself revisiting it at some point in the near future.
April 7, 2019
Even though it’s “only” 140 pages, there is a lot of wisdom packed into this book which can greatly expand one’s ability to engage with a text. Also highly recommend the recordings from his rhetoric class lectures, which are available online. This book encapsulates many of the concepts from those lectures, but the examples, readings and repetition help drive them home and make them functional.
August 6, 2020
An exceptionally jargon-free and straightforward introduction to immanent thought and the constellation of thinkers associated with it (Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Burroughs, Foucault, etc)
"The so-called epistemological problems of philosophers - how can we come to know the world? - are false problems with false questions. Here, we are suggesting that there is no ontological gap between the world and me that creates an epistemological impossibly. On the contrary, the stuff of the world and the stuff of me are more-or-less the same, (while being relentlessly differentiated)."
"The so-called epistemological problems of philosophers - how can we come to know the world? - are false problems with false questions. Here, we are suggesting that there is no ontological gap between the world and me that creates an epistemological impossibly. On the contrary, the stuff of the world and the stuff of me are more-or-less the same, (while being relentlessly differentiated)."
July 5, 2023
Everything I’ve been trying to say about language in the past ten years and no one seems to want to get… and then ruins itself by pulling average high school English teacher bullshit at the tail end.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews