Stephen Wright: Toward a Lexicon of Usership (2013)

“Toward a Lexicon of Usership serves as a toolkit for naming a new form of both artistic and political subjectivity – that of usership. Divided into words that Wright feels ‘should be retired’ such as expert culture, ownership and the disinterested spectator alongside ‘emergent concepts’ like 1:1 scale, loopholes and museum 3.0, Wright introduces ‘modes of usership’ that are becoming ever more prevalent and pertinent today: hacking, gaming and the final term of the lexicon – usership, to name just three.”

Published on the occasion of Museum of Arte Útil.

Publisher Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Dutch License
ISBN 9789490757144
68 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF
Excerpt from Polish edition

Armand Mattelart, Seth Siegelaub (eds.): Communication and Class Struggle, 2: Liberation, Socialism (1983)

“Communication and Class Struggle, a two-volume work, is the first general marxist anthology of writings on communication, information and culture. Its purpose is to analyse the relationship between the practice and theory of communication and their development with the context of class struggle. Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub, the editors, have selected more 128 essential marxist and progressive texts originating in over 50 countries and written since the mid-nineteenth century to explain three interrelated phenomena: (1) how basic social, economic and cultural processes condition communication; (2) how bourgeois communication practice and theory have developed as part of the capitalistic mode of production; and (3) how in the struggle against exploitation and oppression, the popular and working classes have developed their own communication practice and theory, liberated mode of communication, culture and daily life.

The second volume provides an analysis of the development of popular and working-class communication and culture, its theory and practice under different political-social and historical conditions, and its contemporary expression. The book contains 64 texts. 38 are published for the first time in English, and some texts appear for the first time in any language. In addition, it includes a 650-entry bibliography.” (from the back cover)

Publisher International General, New York, and International Mass Media Research Center (IMMRC), Bagnolet, 1983
ISBN 0884770192, 9780884770190
438 pages

Review: Dallas W. Smythe (Journal of Communication 1985, p 218ff).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (40 MB, updated to OCR’d version on 2017-10-30 via Memory of the World)
See also Volume 1.

Sergei Eisenstein: Nonindifferent Nature (1987)

“This is the first publication in English of Eisenstein‘s major theoretical work from the last decade of his life. Almost completed but unrevised at the time of his death in 1948, it comprises three articles from 1939-41 rewritten for the book, together with a substantial text from the period 1945-47. More than a treatise of film theory (though its immediate impetus is clearly the films that Eisenstein worked on at this time, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible Parts I and II), Nonindifferent Nature aspires to the status of a contribution to general aesthetics, and its numerous examples are drawn more from the other arts than from cinema. Indeed, apart from analysing, in retrospect, his own work, Eisenstein scarcely touches on film at all. Instead he deals with the novel (Zola, Tolstoy, Wilkie Collins), painting (El Greco, Chinese landscapes), architecture (Chartres Cathedral, Mayan temples), etching (Piranesi), opera (Wagner), poetry (Pushkin), acting (Frederick Lemaitre), music (Bach, jazz), even cartooning (Saul Steinberg).” (from a review by Russell Campbell)

Translated by Herbert Marshall
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1987
ISBN 0521324157, 9780521324151
xxv+428 pages
via jchill, land

Reviews: Ronald R. Levaco (Los Angeles Times, 1987), Russell Campbell (New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 1991).

WorldCat

PDF (Introduction missing, 7 MB, no OCR)