Vilém Flusser: Towards A Philosophy of Photography (1983–) [DE, EN, PT, ES, HU, CZ, RU]

“Media philosopher Vilém Flusser proposed a revolutionary new way of thinking about photography. An analysis of the medium in terms of aesthetics, science and politics provided him with new ways of understanding both the cultural crises of the past and the new social forms nascent within them. Flusser showed how the transformation of textual into visual culture (from the linearity of history into the two-dimensionality of magic) and of industrial into post-industrial society (from work into leisure) went hand in hand, and how photography allows us to read and interpret these changes with particular clarity.”

Publisher European Photography, 1983
ISBN 3923283016
58 pages

New English edition
Translated by Anthony Mathews
Publisher Reaktion Books, London, 2000
ISBN 1861890761, 9781861890764
94 pages

Review: Sean Cubitt (Leonardo, 2004).

Publisher (EN)

Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie (German, 1983, no OCR, added on 2013-9-26)
Towards A Philosophy of Photography (English, ed. Derek Bennett, 1984, added on 2013-12-14)
Filosofia da caixa preta. Ensaios para uma futura filosofia da fotografia (Portuguese, trans. Vilém Flusser, 1985, unpaginated, updated on 2014-2-13)
Hacia una filosofía de la fotografía (Spanish, trans. Eduardo Molina, 1990, no OCR, added on 2013-9-26)
A fotográfia filozófiája (Hungarian, trans. Panka Veress and István Sebesi, 1990, HTML, added on 2014-2-14)
Za filosofii fotografie (Czech, trans. Božena Koseková and Josef Kosek, 1994, updated on 2017-11-15)
Towards A Philosophy of Photography (English, trans. Anthony Mathews, 2000, updated on 2012-9-18)
Za filosofiyu fotografii (Russian, trans. G. Khaydarova, 2008, added on 2014-2-14)

Richard Barbrook: The Class of the New (2006–) [English, German]

“Netizens, elancers, cognitarians, swarm-capitalists, hackers, produsumers, knowledge workers, pro-ams… these are just a few of the monikers that have been applied to the new social class emerging from the networked workplace.

In this short book, Richard Barbrook presents a collection of quotations from authors who in different ways attempt to identify an innovative element within society: ‘the class of the new’. Announcing a new economic and social paradigm, this class constitutes a ‘social prophecy’ of the shape of work to come. From Adam Smith’s ‘Philosophers’ of the late 18th century, down to the ‘Creative Class’ celebrated by sociologist Richard Florida today, the class of the new represents the future of production within and beyond capitalism.”

Publisher Openmute, London, 2006
A Creative Workers in a World City project
ISBN 0955066476
115 pages

Book website (archived)

The Class of the New (English, 2006, PDF, updated on 2015-6-21)
Die Klasse des Neuen (German, trans. Valie Göschl, 2009, added on 2018-12-22)

CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy

Open source software is considered by many to be a novelty and the open source movement a revolution. Yet the collaborative creation of knowledge has gone on for as long as humans have been able to communicate. CODE looks at the collaborative model of creativity—with examples ranging from collective ownership in indigenous societies to free software, academic science, and the human genome project—and finds it an alternative to proprietary frameworks for creativity based on strong intellectual property rights.

Intellectual property rights, argues Rishab Ghosh in his introduction, were ostensibly developed to increase creativity; but today, policy decisions that treat knowledge and art as if they were physical forms of property actually threaten to decrease creativity, limit public access to creativity, and discourage collaborative creativity. “Newton should have had to pay a license fee before being allowed even to see how tall the ‘shoulders of giants’ were, let alone to stand upon them,” he writes.

The contributors to CODE, from such diverse fields as economics, anthropology, law, and software development, examine collaborative creativity from a variety of perspectives, looking at new and old forms of creative collaboration and the mechanisms emerging to study them. Discussing the philosophically resonant issues of ownership, property, and the commons, they ask if the increasing application of the language of property rights to knowledge and creativity constitutes a second enclosure movement—or if the worldwide acclaim for free software signifies a renaissance of the commons. Two concluding chapters offer concrete possibilities for both alternatives, with one proposing the establishment of “positive intellectual rights” to information and another issuing a warning against the threats to networked knowledge posed by globalization.

CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy
By Rishab Aiyer Ghosh
Edition: illustrated
Published by MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262072602, 9780262072601
345 pages
preview

Review (Michel Bauwens)

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