R. L. Rutsky: High Technē: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (1999)

In an age of high tech, our experience of technology has changed tremendously, yet the definition of technology has remained largely unquestioned. High Techne redresses this gap in thinking about technology, examining the shifting relations of technology, art, and culture from the beginnings of modernity to contemporary technocultures.

Drawing on the Greek root of technology (techne, generally translated as “art, skill, or craft”), R. L. Rutsky challenges both the modernist notion of technology as an instrument or tool and the conventional idea of a noninstrumental aesthetics. Today, technology and aesthetics have again begun to come together: even basketball shoes are said to exhibit a “high-tech style” and the most advanced technology is called “state of the art.” Rutsky charts the history and vicissitudes of this new high-tech techne up to our day — from Fritz Lang to Octavia Butler, Thomas Edison to Japanese Anime, constructivism to cyberspace.

Progressing from the major art movements ofmodernism to contemporary science fiction and cultural theory, Rutsky provides clear and compelling evidence of a shift in the cultural conceptions of technology and art and demonstrates the centrality of technology to modernism and postmodernism.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1999
ISBN 0816633568, 9780816633562
196 pages

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Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, Ollie O. Oviedo (eds.): Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools (2008)

Experts examine the ways digital tools affect social and cultural experience.

The essays in Small Tech investigate the cultural impact of digital tools and provide fresh perspectives on mobile technologies such as iPods, digital cameras, and PDAs and software functions like cut, copy, and paste and WYSIWYG. Together they advance new thinking about digital environments.

Contributors: Wendy Warren Austin, Jim Bizzocchi, Collin Gifford Brooke, Paul Cesarini, Veronique Chance, Johanna Drucker, Jenny Edbauer, Robert A. Emmons Jr., Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Richard Kahn, Douglas Kellner, Karla Saari Kitalong, Steve Mann, Lev Manovich, Adrian Miles, Jason Nolan, Julian Oliver, Mark Paterson, Isabel Pedersen, Michael Pennell, Joanna Castner Post, Teri Rueb, James J. Sosnoski, Lance Strate, Jason Swarts, Barry Wellman, Sean D. Williams, Jeremy Yuille.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816649782, 9780816649785
236 pages

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Gary Hall, Clare Birchall (eds.): New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (2006)

“New Cultural Studies is both an introductory reference work and an original study which explores new directions and territories for cultural studies. A new generation has begun to emerge from the shadow of the Birmingham School. It is a generation whose whole education has been shaped by theory, and who frequently turn to it as a means to think through some of the issues and current problems in contemporary culture and cultural studies.

In a period when departments which were once hotbeds of “high theory” are returning to more sociological and social science oriented modes of research, and 9/11 and the war in Iraq especially have helped create a sense of “post-theoretical” political urgency which leaves little time for the “elitist,” “Eurocentric,” “textual” concerns of “Theory,” theoretical approaches to the study of culture have, for many of this generation, never seemed so important or so vital.

New cultural studies follows such thinkers and theorists, as Agamben, Deleuze, Derrida, Kittler, Laclau, and Zizek as they influence anti-capitalism, ethics, the post-humanities, post-Marxism, and new media technologies.”

Publisher Edinburgh University Press, 2006
ISBN 0748622098, 9780748622092
324 pages

Keywords and phrases
cultural studies, post-Marxism, posthumanities, Marxism, Stuart Hall, Lawrence Grossberg, biopolitical, Friedrich Kittler, tactical media, Paul Bowman, Angela McRobbie, Alain Badiou, anti-capitalism, deconstruction, Raymond Williams, Gilles Deleuze, Michael Hardt, Homo Sacer, Media Theory, neo-liberal

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