In his virtuosic new book noted cultural critic Mark Seltzer shows how suspense, as art form and form of life, depicts and shapes the social systems that organize our modern world. Modernity's predicament, Seltzer writes, is a society so hungry for reality that it cannot stop describing itself, and that makes for a world that continuously establishes itself by staging its own conditions. Employing the social theories of Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, Niklas Luhmann, and Peter Sloterdijk, Seltzer shows how suspense novels, films, and performance art by Patricia Highsmith, Tom McCarthy, Cormac McCarthy, J. G. Ballard, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and others outline how we currently live and reveal the stress-points and mood-systems of the modern epoch. In its focus on social games, depictions of violent and explosive persons, along with its cast of artists, reporters, detectives, and others who observe and report and reenact, the suspense mode creates and recreates modern systems of action and autonomy, and defines the self-turned world's practices and aesthetics. By epitomizing a reflexive, self-legislating, and autonomous world, a suspense art with humans in the systems epoch provides the models and sets the rules for our modern, official world.
- Cover
- Contents
- Part I. The Daily Planet
- Chapter 1. Introduction to the Official World
- The Premises of the Official World
- Suspendedness
- The Human Pyramid
- Disinhibition Training
- Self-Boosterism as Worldview: Paperback Science
- Isotopias
- Highsmith’s Pathographies
- Chapter 2. Brecht’s Rabbit: The Anthropotechnics of Suspense
- The Posthuman Pyramid
- INS
- IRS
- The Uncanny Valley
- Coda: The Loyalty Card
- Part II. Stationary Carousels and Chain Letters: The Ego-Technic Media of the Official World
- Chapter 3. “The Proper Study of Interaction”
- Vicarious Life
- Vicarious Crime
- Chapter 4. Chain Letters
- Official Time
- The Autotropic Mode: Dictaphone, Answering Machine, Twitter
- Wrecking Our Nursery: “To Devise New Means of Destroying the World We Inhabit”
- The Train, the Carousel, and the Movies
- Part III. “Social Games”: Playing Our Part in the Systems Epoch
- Chapter 5. Parlor Games
- The Office and the Laboratory
- Parlor Games
- The Rules of Irrelevance
- The Switchboard of the Social
- The Systems Turn: Art and Anthropotechnics
- Chapter 6. The Natural History of Artificial Life
- Life during Wartime
- Secluded Education
- “Sex in the Outside World”: Art with Humans in Never Let Me Go
- Part IV. Suspended Worlds: Men In Self-Curved Space
- Chapter 7. The Wall of the World
- “A Socialized Trance”: The Practical Joke
- The Crystal World on Wheels: Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express
- The Pear-Shaped Man
- Chapter 8. Marching in Files
- Repeated Repeating: Appointment with Death
- Repeating Repeating: Remainder
- Part V: News from the Outside
- Chapter 9. The Turn Turn
- Away
- The Incrementalist Turn
- Playing Society
- Playing Dead
- Officialism
- Chapter 10. A Postscript on the Official World
- The Autonomization of Everything
- Outside the Official World
- Outside of Everything
- “The Provocation of the Outside”: “The Vanished Age of Space”
- The Anatomy and the Atlas: Knausgaard’s Mein Kampf
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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