Brian Holmes: Driving the Golden Spike: The Aesthetics of Anthropocene Public Space (2016)

“The idea came to me, ironically, while driving around Chicago. It was high summer; I was on the city’s shattered West Side. The urban grid slid by outside the window, residential vernacular on its third or fourth recycle, parched and decayed, with a kind of lost and disjointed vibrancy. Eyes on the traffic, my mind rolled back over the city’s history: its canals and granaries and skyscrapers, its formidable industrial century since the arrival of the railroads in the 1850s, its suburban sprawl after the Great Fire of 1873, its postmodern decline made irreversible by the 1960s revolts and the capital flight that followed. Through it all, the university and financial sectors continued their endless rise. There is a profound violence to this place, but also a deep sense of regularity. Chicago is the race-riot city that turns civil strife into social norms, and splits atoms while abstracting material production into mathematical derivatives. Can you still experiment in a place that has successively been the transport hub, the stockyard, the workshop, the vitrine, the boxing-ring, and quite literally the laboratory of modernism? And what could this ideal of experimentation mean for our future, when its Promethean pasts have reappeared before our eyes as the new geological layer of the Anthropocene?” (opening paragraph)

Publisher Deep Time Chicago, September 2016
Creative Commons BY-ND 4.0 International License
19 pages

Video lecture (April 2016, 47 min)
Publisher

PDF, PDF
HTML (e-flux, Oct 2017)

John Roberts: Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (2015)

“Why the avant-garde of art needs to be rehabilitated today

Since the decidedly bleak beginning of the twenty-first century, art practice has become increasingly politicized. Yet few have put forward a sustained defence of this development. Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde is the first book to look at the legacy of the avant-garde in relation to the deepening crisis of contemporary capitalism.

An invigorating revitalization of the Frankfurt School legacy, Roberts’s book defines and validates the avant-garde idea with an erudite acuity, providing a refined conceptual set of tools to engage critically with the most advanced art theorists of our day, such as Hal Foster, Andrew Benjamin, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Paolo Virno, Claire Bishop, Michael Hardt, and Toni Negri.”

Publisher Verso, London, 2015
ISBN 9781781689134, 178168913X
xii+322 pages

Reviews: Noni Brynjolson (Field, 2015), Danica Radoshevich (Red Wedge, 2015), Kim Charnley (Platypus Review, 2016), Geoffrey Wildanger (LA Review of Books, 2016).

Publisher
WorldCat

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Armand Mattelart, Seth Siegelaub (eds.): Communication and Class Struggle, 1: Capitalism, Imperialism (1979)

“Communication and Class Struggle, a two-volume work, is the first general marxist anthology of writings on communication, information and culture. Its purpose is to analyse the relationship between the practice and theory of communication and their development with the context of class struggle. Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub, the editors, have selected more 128 essential marxist and progressive texts originating in over 50 countries and written since the mid-nineteenth century to explain three interrelated phenomena: (1) how basic social, economic and cultural processes condition communication; (2) how bourgeois communication practice and theory have developed as part of the capitalistic mode of production; and (3) how in the struggle against exploitation and oppression, the popular and working classes have developed their own communication practice and theory, liberated mode of communication, culture and daily life.

This first volume deals with the basic Marxist theory underlying the analysis of the communication process, as well as studies centered on the formation of the capitalist communication apparatus, ideology and ‘mass’ culture. It contains 64 texts. More than one-third are published for the first time in English, and some texts appear for the first time in any language. In addition, it includes an extensive bibliography with over 500 books on the subject.”

Publisher International General, New York, and International Mass Media Research Center (IMMRC), Bagnolet, 1979
ISBN 0884770117, 9780884770114
445 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (37 MB, updated to OCR’d version on 2017-10-30 via Memory of the World)
See also Volume 2.