Marc James Léger: Don’t Network: The Avant Garde after Networks (2018)

“Explores the nature of avant garde art within contemporary capitalism

There is something rotten about network society. Although the information economy promises to create new forms of wealth and social cooperation, the real subsumption of labour under post-Fordism has instead produced a social factory of precarious labour and cybernetic surveillance. In this context people have turned to networks as an ersatz solution to social problems. Networks become the agent of history, a technological determinism that in the best-case scenario leads to post-capitalism but at worst leads to new forms of exploitation and inequality. Don’t Network proposes a third option to technocratic biocapitalism and social movement horizontalism, an analysis of the ways in which vanguard politics and avant-garde aesthetics can today challenge the ideologies of the network society.”

Publisher Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe, 2018
Open access
ISBN 9781570273391
352 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (12 MB)