Sianne Ngai: Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012)

“The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.

Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute’s involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities.

Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman’s poetry to Ed Ruscha’s photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity’s only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.”

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2012
ISBN 0674046587, 9780674046580
344 pages
via batshave

Reviews: Rebecca Ariel Porte (LA Review of Books, 2012), Paul Ardoin (Reviews in Cultural Theory, 2013), Jason Gladstone (Contemporary Literature, 2014), Pansy Duncan (Cultural Studies Review, 2014), Monica Westin (The Believer, 2012), Hua Hsu (Slate, 2012), Douglas Dowland (American Studies, 2014).
Commentary: Adam Jasper (Bookforum, 2013).
Interview with the author (Adam Jasper, Cabinet, 2011)

Publisher

PDF, PDF (14 MB, no OCR, Index missing, updated on 2019-6-23)

Roman Rosdolsky: The Making of Marx’s Capital (1968–) [IT, SR-CR, EN, ES, PT-BR]

Rosdolsky’s Making of Marx’s ‘Capital’ is a major work of interpretation and criticism, written over fifteen years by one of the foremost representatives of the European marxist tradition. Rosdolsky investigates the relationship between various versions of Capital and explains the reasons for Marx’s sucessive reworkings; he provides a textual exegesis of Marx’s Grundrisse, now widely available, and reveals its methodological riches. He presents a critique of later work in the marxist tradition on the basis of Marx’s fundamental distinction between ‘capital in general’ and ‘capital in conrete reality.’

First published in German as Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen ‘Kapital’, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfut am Main, 1968

English edition
Translated by Pete Burgess
Publisher Pluto Press, London, 1977
581 pages

Review (Makoto Itoh, Science & Society, 1979)
Wikipedia (DE)

Genesi e struttura del “Capitale” di Marx (Italian, trans. Bruno Maffi, 1971, no OCR, 21 MB, via)
Prilog povijesti nastajanja Marxova “Kapitala”, sv. 1, sv. 2 (Serbo-Croatian, trans. Ivan Prpić [1] and Hotimir Burger [2], 1975)
The Making of Marx’s Capital (English, trans. Pete Burgess, 1977, 10 MB)
Génesis y estructura de El Capital de Marx (Spanish, trans. Léon Mames, 2nd ed., 1978/2004, no OCR, 11 MB)
Genese e estrutura de O capital de Karl Marx (Brazilian Portuguese, trans. César Benjamin, 2001, no OCR, 20 MB)

Leonardo Electronic Almanac 20 (1): Red Art: New Utopias in Data Capitalism (2014)

The publication investigates the relevance of socialist utopianism to the current dispositions of New Media Art, through the contributions of academic researchers, critical theorists, curators and artists.

Contributors: Boris Cuckovic, Dan Schiller and Shinjoung Yeo, Boris Magrini, Matteo Pasquinelli, Ruth Pages and Gemma San Cornelio, Taus Makhacheva, David Garcia, Valentina Montero Pena and Pedro Donoso, Cornelia Sollfrank, Rahel Puffert and Michel Chevalier, Daphne Dragona, Natalie Bookchin, Karin Hansson, Christina Vatsella, Adam Brown, Elske Rosenfeld, Jose Luis de Vicente, Lanfranco Aceti.

Senior Editors: Lanfranco Aceti, Susanne Jaschko and Julian Stallabrass
Editor: Bill Balaskas
Publisher Leonardo/ISAST, San Francisco, January 2014
ISSN 1071-4391
ISBN 190689728X, 978-1906897284
250 pages
via Marcell Mars

Publisher

PDF (PDF articles)
PDF (single PDF), OPF