{"title":"Aron Vinegar","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"subject-matter-book-aron-vinegar-9780262546362","title":"Subject Matter","description":"A theorization of habit that emphasizes its excessive and unsettling qualities rather than its mediating, adaptive, and stabilizing functions.  Subject Matter offers a bold counterpoint to prevalent conceptions of habit characterized by bodily fluidity and ease, as the stabilizing foundation of an emerging subjectivity, or, more negatively, as a numbing and deadening force. Instead of facilitating the coordination of action with goal and self with environment, habit appears here as a disruptively recursive operation with extreme ontological implications that are often more quotidian than exceptional. Vinegar theorizes habit’s more perturbing aspects, from repetition compulsion to kenosis to breakdown, through an encounter between Hegel’s philosophy (of habit), psychoanalytic dimensions of repetition, Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, and Omer Fast’s feature-length film interpretation of the novel.  Vinegar starts with the premise that habit is an “unhappy mediator,” a disturbance of the very medium and milieu that is constitutive of the subject. Subject Matter pays close attention to those aspects of habit that are usually considered deviations from, or potential threats to, habit proper and that generate a logic of breakdown: automaticity, mechanization, thingness, inertia, and fixity. By plotting a topology of habit’s unbearability through detailed accounts of its manifestation in writing, art, aesthetics, and visuality—and through an attentiveness to the unbalanced nonrelations between mediation and immediacy, being and having, fixity and fluidity, vanishing and overflowing, abbreviation and excess, beginning and ending—Vinegar exposes habit’s failure to mediate and inhabit. In doing so, he offers new and counterintuitive insights into how habit generates the unruly grounds it is supposed to settle, thus allowing us to ask how we might break down differently.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49752878219537,"sku":"NGR9780262546362","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53108402684177,"sku":"NIN9780262546362","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0262546361.jpg?v=1751422186"},{"product_id":"i-am-a-monument-book-aron-vinegar-9780262517522","title":"I AM A MONUMENT","description":"Rereading one of the most influential architectural books of the twentieth century--as intellectual project, graphic design landmark, and prescient introduction to issues of concern today.Learning from Las Vegas, originally published by the MIT Press in 1972, was one of the most influential and controversial architectural books of its era. Forty years later, it remains a perennial bestseller and a definitive theoretical text. Its authors--architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour--famously used the Las Vegas Strip to argue the virtues of the ordinary and ugly above the heroic and original qualities of architectural modernism. Learning from Las Vegas not only moved architecture to the center of cultural debates, it changed our ideas about what architecture was and could be.In this provocative rereading of an iconic text, Aron Vinegar argues that to read Learning from Las Vegas only as an exemplary postmodernist text--to understand it, for example, as a call for pastiche or as ironic provocation--is to underestimate its deeper critical and ethical meaning, and to miss the underlying dialectic between skepticism and the ordinary, expression and the deadpan, that runs through the text.Especially revealing is Vinegar's close analysis of the differences between the first 1972 edition, designed for the MIT Press by Muriel Cooper, and the revised edition of 1977, which was radically stripped down and largely redesigned by Denise Scott Brown.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50347484348689,"sku":"CIN0262517523G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0262517523.jpg?v=1751389091"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-aron-vinegar.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}