Patricia Pisters (ed.): Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari (2001)

This book focuses on the micro-political implications of the work of Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari). General philosophical articles are coupled to more specific analyses of films (such as Fight Club and Schindler’s List) and other expressions of contemporary culture. The choice of giving specific attention to the analyses of images and sounds is not only related to the fact that audiovisual products are increasingly dominant in contemporary life, but also to the fact that film culture in itself is changing (‘in transition’) in capitalist culture. From a marginal place at the periphery of economy and culture at large, audiovisual products (ranging from art to ads) seem to have moved to the centre of the network society, as Manuel Castells calls contemporary society. Typical Deleuzian concepts such as micro-politics, the Body without Organs, becoming-minoritarian, pragmatics and immanence are explored in their philosophical implications and political force, whether utopian or dystopian. What can we do with Deleuze in contemporary media culture? A recurring issue throughout the book is the relationship between theory and practice, to which several solutions and problems are given.

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, 2001
ISBN 9053564721, 9789053564721
302 pages

publisher
google books

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Gary Hall: Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (2008)

“In the sciences, the merits and ramifications of open access—the electronic publishing model that gives readers free, irrevocable, worldwide, and perpetual access to research—have been vigorously debated. Open access is now increasingly proposed as a valid means of both disseminating knowledge and career advancement. In Digitize This Book! Gary Hall presents a timely and ambitious polemic on the potential that open access publishing has to transform both “papercentric” humanities scholarship and the institution of the university itself.

Hall, a pioneer in open access publishing in the humanities, explores the new possibilities that digital media have for creatively and productively blurring the boundaries that separate not just disciplinary fields but also authors from readers. Hall focuses specifically on how open access publishing and archiving can revitalize the field of cultural studies by making it easier to rethink academia and its institutions. At the same time, by unsettling the processes and categories of scholarship, open access raises broader questions about the role of the university as a whole, forcefully challenging both its established identity as an elite ivory tower and its more recent reinvention under the tenets of neoliberalism as knowledge factory and profit center.

Rigorously interrogating the intellectual, political, and ethical implications of open access, Digitize This Book! is a radical call for democratizing access to knowledge and transforming the structures of academic and institutional authority and legitimacy.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816648719, 9780816648719
301 pages

Publisher

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Joanne Richardson (ed.): An@rchitexts: Voices from the Global Digital Resistance (2005)

“An@rchitexts brings together a global mix of voices from the new ‘underground’: engaged artists intervening in local struggles on the streets, media producers promoting technologies based on sharing and cooperation rather than privatization and competition, activists participating in global networks built through electronic democracies and decentralized forms of cooperation, and extraordinary people creating an alternative society through their everyday practices.

As a matter of principle An@rchitexts reflects the first-hand perspective of those involved at the point of production, not distanced reflections by critics, specialists, or armchair theorists.”

Publisher Autonomedia, 2005
ISBN 1570271429, 9781570271427
368 pages

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PDF (13 MB, no OCR, some pages missing, updated on 2019-11-7)