Gary Hall, Clare Birchall (eds.): New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (2006)

“New Cultural Studies is both an introductory reference work and an original study which explores new directions and territories for cultural studies. A new generation has begun to emerge from the shadow of the Birmingham School. It is a generation whose whole education has been shaped by theory, and who frequently turn to it as a means to think through some of the issues and current problems in contemporary culture and cultural studies.

In a period when departments which were once hotbeds of “high theory” are returning to more sociological and social science oriented modes of research, and 9/11 and the war in Iraq especially have helped create a sense of “post-theoretical” political urgency which leaves little time for the “elitist,” “Eurocentric,” “textual” concerns of “Theory,” theoretical approaches to the study of culture have, for many of this generation, never seemed so important or so vital.

New cultural studies follows such thinkers and theorists, as Agamben, Deleuze, Derrida, Kittler, Laclau, and Zizek as they influence anti-capitalism, ethics, the post-humanities, post-Marxism, and new media technologies.”

Publisher Edinburgh University Press, 2006
ISBN 0748622098, 9780748622092
324 pages

Keywords and phrases
cultural studies, post-Marxism, posthumanities, Marxism, Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg, biopolitical, Friedrich Kittler, tactical media, Paul Bowman, Angela McRobbie, Alain Badiou, anti-capitalism, deconstruction, Raymond Williams, Gilles Deleuze, Michael Hardt, Homo Sacer, Media Theory, neo-liberal

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2021-1-5)

Vivian Carol Sobchack: Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004)

“In these essays, Vivian Sobchack considers the key role our bodies play in making sense of today’s image-saturated culture. Emphasizing our corporeal rather than our intellectual engagements with film and other media, Carnal Thoughts shows how our experience always emerges through our senses and how our bodies are not just visible objects but also sense-making, visual subjects. Sobchack draws on both phenomenological philosophy and a broad range of popular sources to explore bodily experience in contemporary, moving-image culture. She examines how, through the conflation of cinema and surgery, we’ve all ‘had our eyes done’; why we are ‘moved’ by the movies; and the different ways in which we inhabit photographic, cinematic, and electronic space. Carnal Thoughts provides a lively and engaging challenge to the mind/body split by demonstrating that the process of ‘making sense’ requires an irreducible collaboration between our thoughts and our senses.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2004
ISBN 0520241290, 9780520241299
328 pages

Keywords and phrases
phenomenological, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, metonymy, irreal, Elaine Scarry, rience, catachresis, Roland Barthes, Martin Heidegger, Decalogue, cyborg, Aimee Mullins, Walter Benjamin, synecdoche, Street of Crocodiles, Million Man March, prosthetic leg, transform fictional, semiotic, Medium Cool

Publisher
Google books

PDF (updated on 2014-12-7)

Sarah Kember: Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (2003)

Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life examines construction, manipulation and re-definition of life in contemporary technoscientific culture. It takes a critical political view of the concept of life as information, tracing this through the new biology and the changing discipline of artificial life and its manifestation in art, language, literature, commerce and entertainment. From cloning to computer games, and incorporating an analysis of hardware, software and ‘wetware’, Sarah Kember demonstrates how this relatively marginal field connects with, and connects up global networks of information systems.

As well as offering suggestions for the evolution of [cyber]feminism in Alife environments, the author identifies the emergence of posthumanism; an ethics of the posthuman subject mobilized in the tension between cold war and post-cold war politics, psychological and biological machines, centralized and de-centralized control, top-down and bottom-up processing, autonomous and autopoietic organisms, cloning and transgenesis, species-self and other species. Ultimately, this book aims to re-focus concern on the ethics rather than on the ‘nature’ of life-as-it-could-be.

Publisher Routledge, 2003
ISBN 0415240263, 9780415240260
257 pages

Keywords and phrases
evolutionary psychology, epistemology, ALife, sociobiology, autopoiesis, posthuman, cyberfeminism, norns, Steve Grand, science wars, SimLife, feminism, ontology, SimEarth, Risan, natural selection, cyborg, connectionism, feminist, autonomous agents

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2013-3-16)