Bernard Stiegler: For a New Critique of Political Economy (2010)

“The catastrophic economic, social and political crisis of our time calls for a new and original critique of political economy – a rethinking of Marx’s project in the very different conditions of twenty-first century capitalism.

Stiegler argues that today the proletarian must be reconceptualized as the economic agent whose knowledge and memory are confiscated by machines. This new sense of the term ‘proletarian’ is best understood by reference to Plato’s critique of exteriorized memory. By bringing together Plato and Marx, Stiegler can show how a generalized proletarianization now encompasses not only the muscular system, as Marx saw it, but also the nervous system of the so-called creative workers in the information industries. The proletarians of the former are deprived of their practical know-how, whereas the latter are shorn of their theoretical practice, and both suffer from a confiscation of the very possibility of a genuine art of living.

But the mechanisms at work in this new and accentuated form of proletarianization are the very mechanisms that may spur a reversal of the process. Such a reversal would imply a crucial distinction between one’s life work, originating in otium (leisure devoted to the techniques of the self), and the job, consisting in a negotium (the negotiation and calculation, increasingly restricted to short-term expectations), leading to the necessity of a new conception of economic value.

This short text offers an excellent introduction to Stiegler’s work while at the same time representing a political call to arms in the face of a deepening economic and social crisis.”

Publisher Polity, 2010
ISBN 0745648045, 9780745648040
100 pages

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Image, Time and Motion: New Media Critique from Turkey (2011)

This reader is a collection of essays written by Turkish graduate students between 2003 and 2010 for Andreas Treske’s seminar ‘Image, Time and Motion’ at Bilkent University in Ankara, revised and actualized in 2010. Coming from a wide range of disciplines they had studied before, very rarely media or cultural studies, these students brought in their various viewpoints and methods, and tried to integrate their observations and understandings in a seminar related to cinema and new media to discuss and sometimes just to describe the influences of digital media technologies for themselves and their colleagues. Starting from the premise that digital technology redefines our moving image culture, the authors reflect in their essays various kind of approaches and methods, experiences and practices, descriptive, critical and interdisciplinary.

Contributors: Pelin Aytemiz, Bestem Büyüm, I. Alev Degim, Bilge Demirtas, Fulya Ertem, Deniz Hasirci, Cagri Baris Kasap, Zeynep Kocer, Rifat Süha Kocoglu, Leyla Önal, Ufuk Önen, Didem Özkul, Segah Sak, Ayda Sevin, Umut Sumnu, Andreas Treske and Funda Senova Tunali.

Edited by: Andreas Treske, Ufuk Onen, Bestem Büyüm and I. Alev Degim
Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2011
Theory on Demand series, No 7
ISBN: 978-90-816021-5-0
146 pages

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David Golumbia: The Cultural Logic of Computation (2009)

Advocates of computers make sweeping claims for their inherently transformative power: new and different from previous technologies, they are sure to resolve many of our existing social problems, and perhaps even to cause a positive political revolution.

In The Cultural Logic of Computation, David Golumbia, who worked as a software designer for more than ten years, confronts this orthodoxy, arguing instead that computers are cultural “all the way down”—that there is no part of the apparent technological transformation that is not shaped by historical and cultural processes, or that escapes existing cultural politics. From the perspective of transnational corporations and governments, computers benefit existing power much more fully than they provide means to distribute or contest it. Despite this, our thinking about computers has developed into a nearly invisible ideology Golumbia dubs “computationalism”—an ideology that informs our thinking not just about computers, but about economic and social trends as sweeping as globalization.

Driven by a programmer’s knowledge of computers as well as by a deep engagement with contemporary literary and cultural studies and poststructuralist theory, The Cultural Logic of Computation provides a needed corrective to the uncritical enthusiasm for computers common today in many parts of our culture.

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2009
ISBN 0674032926, 9780674032927
Length 257 pages

review (Marilyn Lombardi)
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