•  6
    A Philosophy of Luxury
    Routledge. 2019.
    According to the sociologist Max Weber, luxury is the product "of a refusal of utilitarian orientation toward use", whilst Theodor Adorno claimed that luxury is a "longing to escape the slavery of goals". In this thought-provoking book Lambert Wiesing asks simply: What is luxury? He also considers further important questions, such as whether we would we rather live in a world with or without luxury and argues that luxury is something that can be attained by anyone. Drawing on a fascinating range…Read more
  •  6
    The Protreptic Writer
    Flusser Studies 25 (1). 2018.
    Focussing on the text of the essay “The Gesture of Smoking a Pipe,” this paper proposes that at least some of Flusser’s writing can be usefully identified as protreptic. Having arisen in ancient Greece as a form of speech or writing for the explicit purpose of persuading an audience, protreptic also served to display the author’s skills and attract students, persuading young men to take up philosophy. It was never confined to a particular genre of writing, but always addressed its audience in a …Read more
  •  1
    Gestures (edited book)
    Univ of Minnesota Press. 2014.
    Throughout his career, the influential new media theorist Vilém Flusser kept the idea of gesture in mind: that people express their being in the world through a sweeping range of movements. He reconsiders familiar actions—from speaking and painting to smoking and telephoning—in terms of particular movement, opening a surprising new perspective on the ways we share and preserve meaning. A gesture may or may not be linked to specialized apparatus, though its form crucially affects the person who m…Read more
  •  1
    Writing as pretext: On the way to an image
    Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 9 (2): 256-264. 2010.
    The contemporary art college makes a broad range of media available to students, from which writing is conventionally excluded. Writing entered the art college curriculum in the 1960s as a ‘frame’, or means of integrating art and artists into an academic framework, rather than as a medium of potential study. Drawing on the philosophy of Vilém Flusser, the article accepts that writing has exerted a long, if uneven, control over the power of images, and that the introduction of writing into the ar…Read more