liu

The indomitable David Liu is presenting on his project to create an "affective metaphysics," and by affect he means far more than human emotion, but " anything suffered - physical, mental , or otherwise - by any subject, be it human, iron, or whatever." And to suffer is to interpenetrate, to interface. While it has been said in the past that there are few more mandarin pursuits than metaphysics, the need for metaphysical revival has become pressing as digital technologies tear down our common-sense - or should I say medieval? - divisions of the world into individual objects. This ebb and flow, the collapse of these once-sacred divisions of the world, while first brought to widespread attention by literary criticism, actually has much deeper roots, and any project to revise our metaphysics will require a keen sense of history. The study of "New Media" focuses far too much on the "new": As Liu puts it in his translation of the Hebrew Qohelet, "An age goes, an age comes go, but the earth ever stands."