Urs Stäheli: Spectacular Speculation: Thrills, the Economy, and Popular Discourse (2007/2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · economics, economy, finance, market, market economy, psychology, sociology, speculation
Spectacular Speculation is a history and sociological analysis of the semantics of speculation from 1870 to 1930, when speculation began to assume enormous importance in popular culture. Informed by the work of Luhmann, Foucault, Simmel and Deleuze, it looks at how speculation was translated into popular knowledge and charts the discursive struggles of making speculation a legitimate economic practice. Noting that the vocabulary available to discuss the concept was not properly economic, the book reveals the underside of putting it into words. Speculation’s success depended upon non-economic language and morally questionable thrills: a proximity to the wasteful practice of gambling or other “degenerate” behaviors, the experience of financial markets as seductive, or out of control. American discourses of speculation take center stage, and the book covers an unusual range of material, including stock exchange guidebooks, ticker tape, moral treatises, plays, advertisements, and newspapers.
Originally published in German as Spektakuläre Spekulation: Das Populäre der Ökonomie, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2007
Translated by Eric Savoth
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2013
ISBN 0804788251, 9780804788250
312 pages
Jan Cohen-Cruz (ed.): Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology (1998)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, agitprop, art, art criticism, audience, circus, direct action, guerrilla theatre, performance, performance art, politics, puppetry, street theatre, theatre, women
“Radical Street Performance is the first volume to collect together the writings by activists, directors, performers, critics, scholars and journalists who have documented street theatre around the world.
More than thirty essays explore agit-prop, invisible theatre, demonstrations and rallies, direct action, puppetry, parades and pageants, performance art, guerrilla theatre, circuses.
These essays look at performances in Europe, Africa, China, India and both the Americas. They describe engagement with issues as diverse as abortion, colonialism, the environment and homophobia, to name only a few. Introduced by editor Jan Cohen-Cruz, the essays are organized into thematic sections: Agitating; Witnessing; Involving; Imagining; and Popularizing.”
Publisher Routledge, 1998
Performance Theory series
ISBN 0415152313, 9780415152310
302 pages
PDF (no OCR)
Comment (0)Jacques Rancière: Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (1998–) [ES, EN]
Filed under book | Tags: · art history, critical theory, history, history of literature, literary criticism, literature, philosophy, poetry, politics
“Jacques Rancière has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic “distributions of the sensible,” which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. Widely recognized as a seminal work in Rancière’s corpus, the translation of which is long overdue, Mute Speech is an intellectual tour de force proposing a new framework for thinking about the history of art and literature. Rancière argues that our current notion of “literature” is a relatively recent creation, having first appeared in the wake of the French Revolution and with the rise of Romanticism. In its rejection of the system of representational hierarchies that had constituted belles-letters, “literature” is founded upon a radical equivalence in which all things are possible expressions of the life of a people. With an analysis reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, the German Romantics, Vico, and Cervantes and concluding with brilliant readings of Flaubert, Mallarmé, and Proust, Rancière demonstrates the uncontrollable democratic impulse lying at the heart of literature’s still-vital capacity for reinvention.”
First published in French as La Parole muette. Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature, Hachette Litteratures, 1998
English edition
Translated by James Swenson
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2011
New Directions in Critical Theory series
ISBN 0231151039, 9780231151030
194 pages
publisher (EN)
La palabra muda: ensayo sobre las contradicciones de la literatura (Spanish, trans. Cecilia González, 2009, 112 MB, added on 2014-3-6)
Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (English, trans. James Swenson, 2011)