Philip Armstrong: Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political (2009)

“Significantly advancing our notion of what constitutes a network, Philip Armstrong proposes a rethinking of political public space that specifically separates networks from the current popular discussion of globalization and information technology.

Analyzing a wide range of Jean-Luc Nancy’s works, Reticulations shows how his project of articulating the political in terms of singularities, pluralities, and multiplicities can deepen our understanding of networks and how they influence community and politics. Even more striking is the way Armstrong associates this general complex in Nancy’s writing with his concern for what Nancy calls the retreat of the political. Armstrong highlights what Nancy’s perspective on networks reveals about movement politics as seen in the 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization, the impact of technology on citizenship, and finally how this perspective critiques the model of networked communism constructed by Hardt and Negri.

Contesting the exclusive link between technology and networks, Reticulations ultimately demonstrates how network society creates an entirely new politics, one surprisingly rooted in community.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2009
Volume 27 of Electronic mediations
ISBN 0816654905, 9780816654901
307 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2014-9-20)

Georg Lukács: History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923/1972)

Written between 1919 and 1922 and first published in 1923, History and Class Consciousness initiated the current of thought that came to be known as Western Marxism. The book is notable for contributing to debates concerning Marxism and its relation to sociology, politics and philosophy, and for reconstructing many elements of Marx’s theory of alienation before most of the works of the Young Marx, in which it is expounded, had been published. Lukács’s work elaborates and expands upon Marxist theories such as ideology, false consciousness, reification and class consciousness.

Originally published as Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein, 1923.

First published in this edition by Merlin Press, London, 1971
Publisher MIT Press, 1972
ISBN 0262620200, 9780262620208
404 pages

Wikipedia
Publisher
Google books

PDF (23 MB, updated on 2014-9-5)

Jonathan Beller: The Cinematic Mode of Production. Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (2006)

“Cinema brings the industrial revolution to the eye,” writes Jonathan Beller, “and engages spectators in increasingly dematerialized processes of social production.” In his groundbreaking critical study, cinema is the paradigmatic example of how the act of looking has been construed by capital as “productive labor.” Through an examination of cinema over the course of the twentieth century, Beller establishes on both theoretical and historical grounds the process of the emergent capitalization of perception. This process, he says, underpins the current global economy.

By exploring a set of films made since the late 1920s, Beller argues that, through cinema, capital first posits and then presupposes looking as a value-productive activity. He argues that cinema, as the first crystallization of a new order of media, is itself an abstraction of assembly-line processes, and that the contemporary image is a politico-economic interface between the body and capitalized social machinery. Where factory workers first performed sequenced physical operations on moving objects in order to produce a commodity, in the cinema, spectators perform sequenced visual operations on moving montage fragments to produce an image.

Beller develops his argument by highlighting various innovations and film texts of the past century. These innovations include concepts and practices from the revolutionary Soviet cinema, behaviorism, Taylorism, psychoanalysis, and contemporary Hollywood film. He thus develops an analysis of what amounts to the global industrialization of perception that today informs not only the specific social functions of new media, but also sustains a violent and hierarchical global society.

Publisher University Press of New England, 2006
ISBN 1584655836, 9781584655831
332 pages

review (Robert Moses Peaslee, Journal of Communication Inquiry)

publisher
google books

PDF (no OCR; some pages missing; updated on 2012-11-4)
Download a 2003 paper (published in Culture, Theory & Critique 44(1), 2003, pp 91-106; added on 2012-10-20)