Richard Noble (ed.): Utopias (2009)

“Throughout its diverse manifestations, the utopian entails two related but contradictory elements: the aspiration to a better world, and the acknowledgment that its form may only ever live in our imaginations. Furthermore, we are as haunted by the failures of utopian enterprise as we are inspired by the desire to repair the failed and build the new. Contemporary art reflects this general ambivalence. The utopian impulse informs politically activist and relational art, practices that fuse elements of art, design, and architecture, and collaborative projects aspiring to progressive social or political change. Two other tendencies have emerged in recent art: a looking backward to investigate the utopian elements of previous eras, and the imaginative modeling of alternative worlds as intimations of possibility. This anthology contextualizes these utopian currents in relation to political thought, viewing the utopian as a key term in the artistic lineage of modernity. It illuminates how the exploration of utopian themes in art today contributes to our understanding of contemporary cultures, and the possibilities for shaping their futures.”

Artists surveyed include: Joseph Beuys, Paul Chan, Guy Debord, Jeremy Deller, Liam Gillick, Antony Gormley, Dan Graham, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Paul McCarthy, Constant A. Nieuwenheuys, Paul Noble, Nils Norman, Philippe Parreno, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Superflex, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Mark Titchner, Atelier van Lieshout, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol, Wochenklauser, Carey Young

Writers include: Theodor Adorno, Jennifer Allen, Catherine Bernard, Ernst Bloch, Yve-Alain Bois, Nicolas Bourriaud, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Alex Farquharson, Hal Foster, Michel Foucault, Alison Green, Fredric Jameson, Rosalind Krauss, Hari Kunzru, Donald Kuspit, Dermis P. Leon, Karl Marx, Jeremy Millar, Thomas More, William Morris, Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist, George Orwell, Jacques Rancière, Stephanie Rosenthal, Beatrix Ruf

Publisher MIT Press; with Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2009
Documents of Contemporary Arts series
ISBN 0262640694, 9780262640695
238 pages

Publisher

PDF (no OCR; updated on 2023-6-30)

Félix Guattari: Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977, new ed. (2008)

“Chaosophy is an introduction to Félix Guattari’s groundbreaking theories of “schizo-analysis”: a process meant to replace Freudian interpretation with a more pragmatic, experimental, and collective approach rooted in reality. Unlike Freud, who utilized neuroses as his working model, Guattari adopted the model of schizophrenia—which he believed to be an extreme mental state induced by the capitalist system itself, and one that enforces neurosis as a way of maintaining normality. Guattari’s post-Marxist vision of capitalism provides a new definition not only of mental illness, but also of the micropolitical means for its subversion.

Chaosophy includes Guattari’s writings and interviews on the cinema (such as ‘Cinema Fou’ and ‘The Poor Man’s Couch’), a group of texts on his collaborative work with Gilles Deleuze (including the appendix to the second edition of Anti-Oedipus, not available in the English edition), and his texts on homosexuality (including his “Letter to the Tribunal” addressing the French government’s censorship of the special gay issue of Recherches he edited, which earned him a fine for publishing “a detailed exposition of depravity and sexual deviations… the libidinous exhibition of a minority of perverts”). This expanded edition features a new introduction by François Dosse (author of a new biography of Guattari and Gilles Deleuze), along with a range of added essays—including ‘The Plane of Consistency,’ ‘Machinic Propositions,’ ‘Gangs in New York,’ and ‘Three Billion Perverts on the Stand’—nearly doubling the contents of the original edition.”

Edited by Sylvère Lotringer
Introduction by François Dosse
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2008
Foreign Agents series
ISBN 1584350601, 9781584350606
300 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2017-6-26)

Evgeny Morozov: The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (2011)

The internet will set us free—or will it? In this spirited critique of “internet freedom,” blogger and commentator Evgeny Morozov shows how social media and web 2.0 do not always foster civic engagement and democratic reform. In fact, the net can make authoritarian governments even more powerful and repressive.

“The revolution will be Twittered!” declared journalist Andrew Sullivan after protests erupted in Iran in June 2009. Yet for all the talk about the democratizing power of the Internet, regimes in Iran and China are as stable and repressive as ever. In fact, authoritarian governments are effectively using the Internet to suppress free speech, hone their surveillance techniques, disseminate cutting-edge propaganda, and pacify their populations with digital entertainment. Could the recent Western obsession with promoting democracy by digital means backfire?

In this spirited book, journalist and social commentator Evgeny Morozov shows that by falling for the supposedly democratizing nature of the Internet, Western do-gooders may have missed how it also entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder—not easier—to promote democracy. Buzzwords like “21st-century statecraft” sound good in PowerPoint presentations, but the reality is that “digital diplomacy” requires just as much oversight and consideration as any other kind of diplomacy.

Marshaling compelling evidence, Morozov shows why we must stop thinking of the Internet and social media as inherently liberating and why ambitious and seemingly noble initiatives like the promotion of “Internet freedom” might have disastrous implications for the future of democracy as a whole.

Publisher PublicAffairs, 2011
ISBN 1586488740, 9781586488741
432 pages

commentary (Cory Doctorow, The Guardian)

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