Stephan Fuchs: Against Essentialism: A Theory of Culture and Society (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · avant-garde, communication, constructivism, culture, essentialism, ethnomethodology, hermeneutics, networks, social theory, society, sociology, systems theory, theory
Against Essentialism presents a sociological theory of culture. This interdisciplinary and foundational work deals with basic issues common to current debates in social theory, including society, culture, meaning, truth, and communication. Stephan Fuchs argues that many mysteries about these concepts lose their mysteriousness when dynamic variations are introduced.
Fuchs proposes a theory of culture and society that merges two core traditions–American network theory and European (Luhmannian) systems theory. His book distinguishes four major types of social “observers”–encounters, groups, organizations, and networks. Society takes place in these four modes of association. Each generates levels of observation linked with each other into a “culture”–the unity of these observations.
Against Essentialism presents a groundbreaking new approach to the construction of society, culture, and personhood. The book invites both social scientists and philosophers to see what happens when essentialism is abandoned.
Publisher Harvard University Press, 2001
ISBN 0674006100, 9780674006102
380 pages
Julie E. Cohen: Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · code, copyright, everyday, internet, law, life, networks, piracy, play, privacy, security, self, surveillance
The legal and technical rules governing flows of information are out of balance, argues Julie E. Cohen in this original analysis of information law and policy. Flows of cultural and technical information are overly restricted, while flows of personal information often are not restricted at all. The author investigates the institutional forces shaping the emerging information society and the contradictions between those forces and the ways that people use information and information technologies in their everyday lives. She then proposes legal principles to ensure that people have ample room for cultural and material participation as well as greater control over the boundary conditions that govern flows of information to, from, and about them.
Publisher Yale University Press, 2012
ISBN 0300125437, 9780300125436
Printable version is under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike license
352 pages
the author discussing her book (video)
Comment (0)transversal, 01/12: Unsettling Knowledges (2012) [EN, DE, FR, ES, HI]
Filed under journal | Tags: · capitalism, cognitive capitalism, knowledge, knowledge production, labour, politics
“The crises within cognitive capitalism and cognitive labor are mirrored in the reproduction and exacerbation of global divisions of labor and the emergence of new forms of exploitation as part of a regime of flexible capital accumulation. While drastic austerity measures and heightened control mechanisms lead to a radical transformation of the welfare state on the one hand, new networks of communication, struggle and alternative forms of knowledge emerge on the other.
This issue of transversal attempts to review some of the general assumptions of a theory of cognitive capitalism and to unsettle the very notions of knowledge and its production, discussing the conditions of its capture, its “re-invention” and its capacity for creating worlds. The individual essays follow the lines of a (post-)colonial historicity and a feminist and geopolitical critique of capitalist valorization, thereby questioning the materiality of knowledge and its production in relation to resources and bodies, as well as how art and knowledge production are interwoven with political struggles.”
With contributions by Lina Dokuzović, Silvia Federici, Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Therese Kaufmann, Christian Kravagna, Brigitta Kuster, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter Mignolo, Raimund Minichbauer
Editors: Aileen Derieg, Lina Dokuzović, Marcelo Expósito, Therese Kaufmann, Raimund Minichbauer, Radostina Patulova, Gerald Raunig
Publisher eipcp – European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna/Linz
Copyleft
ISSN 1811-1696
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