Jodi Dean: Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (2010)

“Blog Theory offers a critical theory of contemporary media. Furthering her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean explores the ways new media practices like blogging and texting capture their users in intensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. Her wide-ranging and theoretically rich analysis extends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through media histories, to newly emerging social network platforms and applications.

Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought by neoliberalism, the book engages with recent work in contemporary media theory as well as with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Zizek. Through these engagements, Dean defends the provocative thesis that reflexivity in complex networks is best understood via the psychoanalytic notion of the drives. She contends, moreover, that reading networks in terms of the drives enables us to grasp their real, human dimension, that is, the feelings and affects that embed us in the system.

In remarkably clear and lucid prose, Dean links seemingly trivial and transitory updates from the new mass culture of the internet to more fundamental changes in subjectivity and politics. Everyday communicative exchanges–from blog posts to text messages–have widespread effects, effects that not only undermine capacities for democracy but also entrap us in circuits of domination.”

Publisher Polity, 2010
ISBN 0745649696, 9780745649696
140 pages

Reviews: Jussi Parikka (Leonardo, 2010), Julia Lupton (LA Review of Books, 2012), Matthew Flisfeder (Reviews in Cultural Theory, 2012), McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar, 2015).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-5-31)

Andrew Feenberg: Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity (2010)

“The technologies, markets, and administrations of today’s knowledge society are in crisis. We face recurring disasters in every domain: climate change, energy shortages, economic meltdown. The system is broken, despite everything the technocrats claim to know about science, technology, and economics. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that today powerful technologies have unforeseen effects that disrupt everyday life; the new masters of technology are not restrained by the lessons of experience, and accelerate change to the point where society is in constant turmoil. In Between Reason and Experience, leading philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg makes a case for the interdependence of reason—scientific knowledge, technical rationality—and experience.

Feenberg examines different aspects of the tangled relationship between technology and society from the perspective of critical theory of technology, an approach he has pioneered over the past twenty years. Feenberg points to two examples of democratic interventions into technology: the Internet (in which user initiative has influenced design) and the environmental movement (in which science coordinates with protest and policy). He examines methodological applications of critical theory of technology to the case of the French Minitel computing network and to the relationship between national culture and technology in Japan. Finally, Feenberg considers the philosophies of technology of Heidegger, Habermas, Latour, and Marcuse. The gradual extension of democracy into the technical sphere, Feenberg argues, is one of the great political transformations of our time.”

Foreword by Brian Wynne
Afterword by Michel Callon
Publisher MIT Press, 2010
Inside Technology series
ISBN 0262514257, 9780262514255
248 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2015-12-22)

Shifter Magazine 16: Pluripotential (2010)

“We present scores, scripts, instructions, critical essays and more for Shifter’s 16th issue entitled ‘Pluripotential’.

Here we invoke a term, which describes the innate ability of stem-cells to differentiate into almost any cell in the body, to think through the possibility of criticality and cultural change through aesthetic strategies.

The skin that we are born with is transformed as a result of its life of touches, caresses and trauma and becomes flesh. While on the one hand each of us experiences a unique set of circumstances, our common knowledge also shapes this flesh. Analogously, the brain becomes the mind through its history of experiences: A British child growing up in Tokyo speaks fluent Japanese, something her parents having arrived later in life to Japan may never be able to do. The brain is prepared for a multiplicity of cultural and linguistic conditions, within certain biological limits of malleability. Furthermore, as Agamben has noted, ‘the child […], is potential in the sense that [s]he must suffer an alteration (a becoming other) through learning.’

These limits of malleability may fall within the paradigm of what Ranciere calls the distribution of the sensible: “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception, that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common, and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.” Does art have the pluripotential ability to produce events in the cultural landscape, which in turn produce a redistribution of the sensible: a shift in public consciousness concerning how and what we see and feel, and furthermore a reconsideration of who constitutes the public ‘we’. Here the contradicting ideas of a homogeneous people, versus the singularities that produce differences within the multitude become relevant.

This play between structural constraints and a potential for continuous change is seen in forms such as scores, scripts and instructions; and strategies including ‘detournement’ and remix, which hold within them the potential to be performed and reconstituted in multiple ways. It is therefore through these forms that we set out to explore ‘Pluripotential’.” (editors)

Contributors:
 Éric Alliez
, Bernard Andrieu, 
Eric Anglès
, Kader Attia, 
Elena Bajo, 
Lindsay Benedict
, Nicholas Chase, 
Seth Cluett
, Zoe Crosher
, Krysten Cunningham, 
Yevgeniy Fiks
, Dan Levenson, 
Antje Majewski
, T. Kelly Mason, 
Michele Masucci
, Daniel Miller, 
Seth Nehil
, Warren Neidich, 
Susanne Neubauer, 
Hans Ulrich Obrist
, Chloe Piene, 
Sreshta Rit Premnath, 
Linda Quinlan, 
Patricia Reed
, Silva Reichwein, 
Barry Schwabsky, 
Gemma Sharpe, 
Amy Sillman
, Francesco Spampinato, 
Tyler Stallings, 
Laura Stein, 
Clarissa Tossin
, Brindalyn Webster
, Lee Welch
, Olav Westphalen
, James Yeary

Edited by Sreshta Rit Premnath and Warren Neidich
Published in April 2010
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License

Magazine website

PDF (updated on 2013-8-1)
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