Jasper Bernes: The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (2017)

“A novel account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture, this book looks at American poetry and art of the last fifty years in light of the massive changes in people’s working lives. Over the last few decades, we have seen the shift from an economy based on the production of goods to one based on the provision of services, the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, and the emergence of new digital technologies that have transformed the way people work. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization argues that art and literature not only reflected the transformation of the workplace but anticipated and may have contributed to it as well, providing some of the terms through which resistance to labor was expressed. As firms continue to tout creativity and to reorganize in response to this resistance, they increasingly rely on models of labor that derive from values and ideas found in the experimental poetry and conceptual art of decades past.”

Publisher Stanford University Press, 2017
Post ’45 series
ISBN 9780804796415, 0804796416
viii+231 pages

Reviews: Stevphen Shukaitis (Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2017), Julian Murphet (Affirmations, 2017), Vince Carducci (Public Seminar, 2017).

Publisher
WorldCat

HTML

Armand Mattelart, Seth Siegelaub (eds.): Communication and Class Struggle, 1: Capitalism, Imperialism (1979)

“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.

This first volume deals with the basic Marxist theory underlying the analysis of the communication process, as well as studies centered on the formation of the capitalist communication apparatus, ideology and ‘mass’ culture. It contains 64 texts. More than one-third are published for the first time in English, and some texts appear for the first time in any language. In addition, it includes an extensive bibliography with over 500 books on the subject.”

Publisher International General, New York, and International Mass Media Research Center (IMMRC), Bagnolet, 1979
ISBN 0884770117, 9780884770114
445 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (37 MB, updated to OCR’d version on 2017-10-30 via Memory of the World)
See also Volume 2.

The Anthropocene Project. An Encyclopedia (2014–) [EN/DE]

A glossary of 80 selected terms associated with the notion of the Anthropocene. Each entry is accompanied by numerous videos of talks and discussions held during The Anthropocene Project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, in 2013-2014.

“Forensics and cybernetics, climate crimes and neo-ecology, scopic systems, prosthesis, fossils, beauty, or the obscene. The Anthropocene Project’s core terminology appears incomprehensible and impenetrable at first. The encyclopedia, currently under development as an online presentation at büro eta boeklund, is dedicated to this vocabulary. It offers sidelong glances that can help to illuminate the jungle of discourse and show the beauty of the Anthropocene Project’s terminology in a clear and easily understandable fashion. Like every system of classification, this project calls into question our world’s unspoken habits when it comes to categorization.”

View online in English or German.