Nick Dyer-Witheford: Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-technology Capitalism (1999)

In this highly readable and thought-provoking work, Nick Dyer-Witheford assesses the relevance of Marxism in our time and demonstrates how the information age, far from transcending the historic conflict between capital and its laboring subjects, constitutes the latest battleground in their encounter.

Dyer-Witheford maps the dynamics of modern capitalism, showing how capital depends for its operations not just on exploitation in the immediate workplace but on the continuous integration of a whole series of social sites and activities, from public health and maternity to natural resource allocation and the geographical reorganization of labor power. He also shows how these sites and activities may become focal points of subversion and insurgency, as new means of communication vital for the smooth flow of capital also permit otherwise isolated and dispersed points of resistance to connect and combine with one another.

Dyer-Witheford predicts the advent of a reinvented, “autonomist” Marxism thatwill rediscover the possibility of a collective, communist transformation of society. Refuting the utopian promises of the information revolution, he discloses the real potentialities for a new social order in the form of a twenty-first-century communism based on the common sharing of wealth.

Published by University of Illinois Press, 1999
ISBN 0252067959, 9780252067952
344 pages

Key terms: labor power, Fordism, autonomist Marxism, Harry Cleaver, postmodern, Antonio Negri, post-Fordist, neoliberal, computer networks, technoscientific, postindustrial, post-Fordism, Karl Marx, Felix Guattari, capitalist, information society, Michael Hardt, Sergio Bologna, post-Marxism, Mariarosa Dalla Costa

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-27)

Mariellen R. Sandford (ed.): Happenings and Other Acts (1995)

“The works of art and performance known as Happenings have often been considered to be the key to an understanding of the late twentieth-century avant-garde. Happenings and Other Acts discusses what ‘Happenings’ were, who made them and why, and the relationship they have to their origins in Dadaism and their antecedents in performance art. Articles, statements, interviews and essays by and about some of the most influential avant-garde artists and performers–Allan Kaprow, John Cage, Claes Oldenburg, Ann Halprin and George Maciunas–are presented here for the first time since they were originally published. The volume concludes with a commissioned essay by Gunter Berghaus on European Happenings.”

Publisher Routledge, 1995
ISBN 0415099366, 9780415099363
xxv+397 pages

Reviews: Marla Carlson (Theatre J, 1996), Ágnes Ivacs (Artpool, n.d.).

PDF (6 MB, updated on 2016-12-23)

Vilém Flusser: Writings (2002)

Ten years after his death, Vilém Flusser’s reputation as one of Europe’s most original modern philosophers continues to grow. Increasingly influential in Europe and Latin America, the Prague-born intellectual’s thought has until now remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. His innovative writings theorize—and ultimately embrace—the epochal shift that humanity is undergoing from what he termed “linear thinking” (based on writing) toward a new form of multidimensional, visual thinking embodied by digital culture. For Flusser, these new modes and technologies of communication make possible a society (the “telematic” society) in which dialogue between people becomes the supreme value.

The first English-language anthology of Flusser’s work, this volume displays the extraordinary range and subtlety of his intellect. A number of the essays collected here introduce and elaborate his theory of communication, influenced by thinkers as diverse as Martin Buber, Edmund Husserl, and Thomas Kuhn. While taking dystopian, posthuman visions of communication technologies into account, Flusser celebrates their liberatory and humanizing aspects. For Flusser, existence was akin to being thrown into an abyss of absurd experience or “bottomlessness”; becoming human required creating meaning out of this painful event by consciously connecting with others, in part through such technologies. Other essays present Flusser’s thoughts on the future of writing, the revolutionary nature of photography, the relationship between exile and creativity, and his unconventional concept of posthistory. Taken together, these essays confirm Flusser’s importance and prescience within contemporary philosophy.

Edited by Andreas Ströhl
Translated by Erik Eisel
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2002
Electronic Meditations series, Vol 6
ISBN 0816635641, 9780816635641
229 pages

review (Sean Cubitt, Leonardo Reviews)

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)