Paul Rabinow: Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment (2003)

The discipline of anthropology is, at its best, characterized by turbulence, self-examination, and inventiveness. In recent decades, new thinking and practice within the field has certainly reflected this pattern, as shown for example by numerous fruitful ventures into the “politics and poetics” of anthropology. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been given to the simple insight that anthropology is composed of claims, whether tacit or explicit, about anthropos and about logos–and the myriad ways in which these two Greek nouns have been, might be, and should be, connected. Anthropos Today represents a pathbreaking effort to fill this gap.

Paul Rabinow brings together years of distinguished work in this magisterial volume that seeks to reinvigorate the human sciences. Specifically, he assembles a set of conceptual tools–“modern equipment”–to assess how intellectual work is currently conducted and how it might change.

Anthropos Today crystallizes Rabinow’s previous ethnographic inquiries into the production of truth about life in the world of biotechnology and genome mapping (and his invention of new ways of practicing this pursuit), and his findings on how new practices of life, labor, and language have emerged and been institutionalized. Here, Rabinow steps back from empirical research in order to reflect on the conceptual and ethical resources available today to conduct such inquiries.

Drawing richly on Foucault and many other thinkers including Weber and Dewey, Rabinow concludes that a “contingent practice” must be developed that focuses on “events of problematization.” Brilliantly synthesizing insights from American, French, and German traditions, he offers a lucid, deeply learned, original discussion of how one might best think about anthropos today.

Publisher Princeton University Press, 2003
ISBN 0691115664, 9780691115665
159 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-10-29)

Guy Debord: Society of the Spectacle (1967–) [FR, EN, NL, GR, DE, IT, ES, TR, BR-PT, RO, SR, HU, LT, PL, CZ]

“The Das Kapital of the 20th century. An essential text, and the main theoretical work of the situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960’s up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century.

Self-proclaimed leader of the Situationist International, Guy Debord was certainly responsible for the longevity and high profile of Situationist ideas, although the equation of the SI with Guy Debord would be misleading. Brilliant but autocratic, Debord helped both unify situationist praxis and destroy its expansion into areas not explicitly in line with his own ideas. His text The Society of the Spectacle remains today one of the great theoretical works on modern-day capital, cultural imperialism, and the role of mediation in social relationships.”

Publisher Buchet-Chastel, Paris, Nov 1967
175 pages

Wikipedia (EN)

La Société du Spectacle (French, 1967; HTML)
Society of the Spectacle (English, trans. Fredy Perlman and Jon Supak, 1970; HTML)
De spektakelmaatschappij (Dutch, trans. Jaap Kloosterman and René van de Kraats, 1976/2001, updated on 2019-11-8)
Η Κοινωνία του Θεάματος (Greek, trans. Panos Tsachageas and Nikos B. Alexiou, 1977, updated on 2019-11-8)
Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels (German, trans. Jean-Jacques Raspaud, 1978)
La societa dello spettacolo (Italian, trans. Paolo Salvadori, 1979)
Society of the Spectacle (English, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, 1994; HTML)
La sociedad del espectacul (Spanish, trans. Rodrigo Vicuña Navarro, 1995)
Gösteri toplumu ve yorumlar (Turkish, trans. Ayşen Ekmekçi and Okşan Taşkent, 1996, added on 2012-12-27)
A sociedade do espetaculo (BR-Portuguese, trans. Estela dos Santos Abreu, 1997)
Societatea spectacolului. Comentarii la societatea spectacolului (Romanian, trans. Ciprian Mihali and Radu Stoenescu, 1998)
La sociedad del espectacul (Spanish, trans. José Luis Pardo, 1999)
Η Κοινωνία του Θεάματος (Greek, trans. Sylvia, 2000, added on 2019-11-8)
Society of the Spectacle (English, trans. Ken Knabb, 2005; new ed., annotated, 2014, HTML, PDF, EPUB, added on 2019-11-12)
Društvo spektakla (Serbian, trans. Aleksa Golijanin, 2003/2012; HTML, added on 2017-7-27)
Spektákulum társadalma (Hungarian, trans. Miklós Erhardt, 2006, updated on 2019-11-8)
Spektaklio visuomenė (Lithuanian, 2006, added on 2019-11-8)
Społeczeństwo spektaklu oraz Rozważania o społeczeństwie spektaklu (Polish, trans. Mateusz Kwaterko, 2006, updated on 2019-11-8)
Společnost spektáklu (Czech, 2007, updated on 2019-7-21)
La sociedad del espectacul (Spanish, trans. Colectivo Maldeojo, 2009)
Societatea spectacolului (Romanian, trans. Cristina Săvoiu, 2011, added on 2015-11-29)

Mark Tribe, Reena Jana: New Media Art (2006-)

Artists have always been early adopters of emerging media technologies, from Albrecht Dürer and the printing press in the 16th century to Nam June Paik’s video experiments in the 1960s. In 1994, the advent of the internet as a popular medium catalyzed a global art movement that began to explore the cultural, social, and aesthetic possibilities of new communication technologies–the web, webcams and video surveillance cameras, wireless phones, hand-held computers, and GPS devices. This book addresses New Media art as a specific art historical movement, focusing on technologies, forms, thematic content and conceptual strategies. Often involving appropriation, collaboration, and shared ideas and expressions, New Media art frequently addresses issues of identity, commercialization, privacy, and public domain. Many New Media artists are profoundly aware of their historical antecedents, making reference to Dada, Pop Art, Conceptual art, Performance art, and Fluxus.

Featured artists: Cory Arcangel, Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Vuk Cosic, Mary Flanagan, Ken Goldberg, Paul Kaiser and Shelly Eshkar, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Mouchette, MTAA, Keith and Mendi Obadike, Radical Software Group, Raqs Media Collective, RTMark, and John F. Simon Jr.

This open-source wiki book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License. It is based on the manuscript of New Media Art, a book written by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana and published by Taschen in 2006. The Taschen book is available in French, German, Italian and Spanish in addition to English. This wiki book is not intended as a substitute or replacement for the Taschen book, but rather as an expandable educational resource to which artists, curators, students and others may contribute.

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