Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, Vassilis Tsianos: Escape Routes. Control and Subversion in the Twenty-first Century (2008)

Illegal migrants who evade detection, creators of value in insecure and precarious working conditions and those who refuse the constraints of sexual and biomedical classifications: these are the people who manage to subvert power and to craft unexpected sociabilities and experiences. Escape Routes shows how people can escape control and create social change by becoming imperceptible to the political system of Global North Atlantic societies.

Publisher Pluto Press, 2008
ISBN 0745327788, 9780745327785
300 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-8-2)

Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009–) [EN, CZ, CR, GR, ES, FR, IT]

“After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system – a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it will also show that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program capitalism in fact is anything but realistic.”

Publisher Zero Books, Winchester, 2009
ISBN 1846943175, 9781846943171
81 pages

Interview with author: Matthew Fuller (Monthly Review, 2009).
Reviews: Steven Sherman (Marx&Philosophy, 2010), Ben Granger (Spike, 2010), John F. Murphy (Critical Sociology, 2010), Ed Rooksby (Historical Materialism, 2012), Todd Hoffman (Ctheory, 2016), Matěj Metelec (A2, 2010, CZ), Roman Rakowski (Britské listy, 2010, CZ).

Commentary: Mark Fisher (Strike!, 2012), Alison Shonkwiler, Leigh Claire La Berge et al. (Reading Capitalist Realism, 2014), Alfie Bown (LSE blog, 2017).

Wikipedia
Publisher
Worldcat

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (English, 2009, updated on 2017-7-12)
Kapitalistický realismus: proč je dnes snazší představit si konec světa než konec kapitalismu (Czech, trans. Radovan Baroš, 2010, 29 MB, added on 2020-4-7)
Kapitalistički realizam: Zar nema alternative? (Croatian, 2011, 4 MB, added on 2013-9-26, updated on 2020-4-7)
Καπιταλιστικός ρεαλισμός. Υπάρχει άραγε εναλλακτική; (Greek, trans. Θέμης Πανταζάκος, 2015, added on 2017-7-12, updated on 2020-4-7)
Realismo Capitalista. ¿No hay alternativa? (Spanish, trans. Claudio Iglesias, 2016, 7 MB, added on 2021-1-22)
Le réalisme capitaliste: n’y t’il qu’une alternative? (French, trans. Julien Guazzini, 2018, added on 2020-4-7)
Realismo capitalismo (Italian, trans. Valerio Mattioli, 2018, added on 2020-4-7)

Joanna Demers: Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (2010)

“Contemporary electronic music has splintered into a dizzying assortment of genres and subgenres, communities and subcultures. Given the ideological differences among academic, popular and avant-garde electronic musicians, is it possible to derive an aesthetic theory that accounts for this variety? And is there even a place for aesthetics in twenty-first-century culture?

Listening through the Noise explores genres ranging from techno to electroacoustic music, from glitch to drone music, and from dub to drones, and maintains that culturally and historically informed aesthetic theory is not only possible but indispensable for understanding electronic music. The abilities of electronic music to use preexisting sounds and to create new sounds are widely known. Author Joanna Demers proceeds from this starting point to consider how electronic music is changing the way we listen not only to music, but to sound itself. The common trait among all variants of recent experimental electronic music is a concern with whether sound, in itself, bears meaning. The use in recent works of previously undesirable materials like noise, field recordings, and extremely quiet sounds has contributed to electronic music’s destruction of the “musical frame,” the conventions that used to set apart music from the outside world. In the void created by the disappearance of the musical frame, different philosophies for listening have emerged. Some electronic music genres insist upon the inscrutability and abstraction of sound. Others maintain that sound functions as a sign pointing to concepts or places beyond the work. But all share an approach towards listening that departs fundamentally from the expectations that have governed music listening in the West for the previous five centuries.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2010
ISBN 0195387651, 9780195387650
248 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)