Sandra Braman: Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power (2006)

As the informational state replaces the bureaucratic welfare state, control over information creation, processing, flows, and use has become the most effective form of power. In Change of State Sandra Braman examines the theoretical and practical ramifications of this “change of state.” She looks at the ways in which governments are deliberate, explicit, and consistent in their use of information policy to exercise power, exploring not only such familiar topics as intellectual property rights and privacy but also areas in which policy is highly effective but little understood. Such lesser-known issues include hybrid citizenship, the use of “functionally equivalent borders” internally to allow exceptions to U.S. law, research funding, census methods, and network interconnection. Trends in information policy, argues Braman, both manifest and trigger change in the nature of governance itself.

After laying the theoretical, conceptual, and historical foundations for understanding the informational state, Braman examines 20 information policy principles found in the U.S Constitution. She then explores the effects of U.S. information policy on the identity, structure, borders, and change processes of the state itself and on the individuals, communities, and organizations that make up the state. Looking across the breadth of the legal system, she presents current law as well as trends in and consequences of several information policy issues in each category affected.

Change of State introduces information policy on two levels, coupling discussions of specific contemporary problems with more abstract analysis drawing on social theory and empirical research as well as law. Most important, the book provides a way of understanding how information policy brings about the fundamental social changes that come with the transformation to the informational state.

Publisher MIT Press, 2006
ISBN 0262025973, 9780262025973
545 pages

publisher
google books

PDF

Giorgio Agamben: What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (2006-) [IT, EN, PT]

“The three essays collected in this book offer a succinct introduction to Agamben’s recent work through an investigation of Foucault’s notion of the apparatus, a meditation on the intimate link of philosophy to friendship, and a reflection on contemporariness, or the singular relation one may have to one’s own time.

‘Apparatus’ (dispositif in French) is at once a most ubiquitous and nebulous concept in Foucault’s later thought. In a text bearing the same name (‘What is a dispositif?’) Deleuze managed to contribute its mystification, but Agamben’s leading essay illuminates the notion: ‘I will call an apparatus,’ he writes, ‘literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.’ Seen from this perspective, Agamben’s work, like Foucault’s, may be described as the identification and investigation of apparatuses, together with incessant attempts to find new ways to dismantle them.

Though philosophy contains the notion of philos, or friend, in its very name, philosophers tend to be very skeptical about friendship. In his second essay, Agamben tries to dispel this skepticism by showing that at the heart of friendship and philosophy, but also at the core of politics, lies the same experience: the shared sensation of being.

Guided by the question, “What does it mean to be contemporary?” Agamben begins the third essay with a reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy and Mandelstam’s poetry, proceeding from these to an exploration of such diverse fields as fashion, neurophysiology, messianism and astrophysics.”

“What is an Apparatus?” was originally published in Italian as Che cos’è un dispositivo?, Nottetempo, 2006
“The Friend” was originally published in Italian as L’amico, Nottetempo, 2007
“What Is the Contemporary?” was originally published in Italian as Che cos’è il contemporaneo?, Nottetempo, 2008

English edition
Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2009
Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series
ISBN 0804762309, 9780804762304
56 pages

Commentary: Matteo Pasquinelli (Parrhesia, 2015).

Publisher (EN)

Che cos’è un dispositivo? (Italian, 2006)
L’amico (Italian, 2007)
Che cos’è il contemporaneo? e altri scritti (Italian, 2010)
What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (English, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, 2009)
O que é o contemporâneo. e outros ensaios (Portuguese, trans. Vinícius Nicastro Honesko, 2009)

Christopher Hayes: Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (2012)

A powerful and original argument that traces the roots of our present crisis of authority to an unlikely source: the meritocracy.

Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one institution after another – from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to corporate America, even Major League Baseball – imploded under the weight of corruption and incompetence. In the wake of the Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust in their institutions; the social contract between ordinary citizens and elites lies in tatters.

How did we get here? With Twilight of the Elites, Christopher Hayes offers a radically novel answer. Since the 1960s, as the meritocracy elevated a more diverse group of men and women into power, they learned to embrace the accelerating inequality that had placed them near the very top. Their ascension heightened social distance and spawned a new American elite–one more prone to failure and corruption than any that came before it.

Mixing deft political analysis, timely social commentary, and deep historical understanding, Twilight of the Elites describes how the society we have come to inhabit – utterly forgiving at the top and relentlessly punitive at the bottom – produces leaders who are out of touch with the people they have been trusted to govern. Hayes argues that the public’s failure to trust the federal government, corporate America, and the media has led to a crisis of authority that threatens to engulf not just our politics but our day-to-day lives.

Upending well-worn ideological and partisan categories, Hayes entirely reorients our perspective on our times. Twilight of the Elites is the defining work of social criticism for the post-bailout age.

Publisher Crown Publishers, a division of Random House, New York, June 2012
ISBN 0307720470, 9780307720474
320 pages

review (Glenn Greenwald, Salon)
review (Aaron Swartz)
review (David Brooks, The New York Times)
review (Hua Hsu, Slate)

wikipedia
publisher
google books

PDF (EPUB)