Jasper Bernes: The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (2017)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, avant-garde, capitalism, cybernetics, information, labour, literary criticism, marxism, poetry, postindustrial, productivity, taylorism, technology, work
“A novel account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture, this book looks at American poetry and art of the last fifty years in light of the massive changes in people’s working lives. Over the last few decades, we have seen the shift from an economy based on the production of goods to one based on the provision of services, the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, and the emergence of new digital technologies that have transformed the way people work. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization argues that art and literature not only reflected the transformation of the workplace but anticipated and may have contributed to it as well, providing some of the terms through which resistance to labor was expressed. As firms continue to tout creativity and to reorganize in response to this resistance, they increasingly rely on models of labor that derive from values and ideas found in the experimental poetry and conceptual art of decades past.”
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2017
Post ’45 series
ISBN 9780804796415, 0804796416
viii+231 pages
Reviews: Stevphen Shukaitis (Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2017), Julian Murphet (Affirmations, 2017), Vince Carducci (Public Seminar, 2017).
Comment (0)Nathan Brown: The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (2017)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, fabrication, literary criticism, literary theory, literature, materialism, materials science, nanotechnology, ontology, philosophy, poetics, poetry, technē
“Poetry, or poiēsis, has long been understood as a practice of making. But how are experiments in the making of poetic forms related to formal making in science and engineering? The Limits of Fabrication takes up this question in the context of recent developments in nanoscale materials science, investigating concepts and ideologies of form at stake in new approaches to material construction. Tracing the direct pertinence of fields crucial to the new materials science (nanotechnology, biotechnology, crystallography, and geodesic design) in the work of Shanxing Wang, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, and Ronald Johnson back to the midcentury development of Charles Olson’s ‘objectist’ poetics, Nathan Brown carves out a tradition of constructivist, nonorganic poetics that has developed in conversation with science and engineering.
While proposing a new approach to the relation of technē (craft, skill) and poiēsis (making, forming), this book also intervenes in philosophical debates concerning the concept of the object, the distinction between organic and inorganic matter, theories of self-organization, and the relation between ‘design’ and ‘nature’. Engaging with Heidegger, Agamben, Whitehead, Stiegler, and Nancy, Brown shows that materials science and materialist poetics offer crucial resources for thinking through the direction of contemporary materialist philosophy.”
Publisher Fordham University Press, New York, 2017
ISBN 9780823272990, 0823272990
xi+296 pages
via Memory of the World
Review: Tom Eyers (boundary2, 2017).
PDF (26 MB)
Comment (0)Nathan Brown, Petar Milat (eds.): Poiesis (2017)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, literary criticism, literary theory, literature, poetry
A volume based on a three-day symposium of the same title held at MaMa, Zagreb, in 2015.
Contributions by Thomas Schestag, Branka Arsić, David Wills, Jed Rasula, Marie Gil, Alexi Kukuljevic, Amanda Holmes, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Julie Beth Napolin, Aaron Schuster, Dee Morris & Stephen Voyce, and Nathan Brown.
Publisher Multimedijalni institut, Zagreb, and Centre for Expanded Poetics (Concordia University), Montréal, 2017
ISBN 9789537372132
234+xxxiii pages
PDF
See also Angela Rawlings’ book Si Tu (2017).