Andrew Barry: Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · citizenship, european union, governance, intellectual property, interactivity, neoliberalism, networks, politics, society, sociology of science, technology
Technology assumes a remarkable importance in contemporary political life. Today, politicians and intellectuals extol the virtues of networking, interactivity and feedback, and stress the importance of new media and biotechnologies for economic development and political innovation. Measures of intellectual productivity and property play an increasingly critical part in assessments of the competitiveness of firms, universities and nation-states. At the same time, contemporary radical politics has come to raise questions about the political preoccupation with technical progress, while also developing a certain degree of technical sophistication itself.
In a series of in-depth analyses of topics ranging from environmental protest to intellectual property law, and from interactive science centres to the European Union, this book interrogates the politics of the technological society. Critical of the form and intensity of the contemporary preoccupation with new technology, Political Machines opens up a space for thinking the relation between technical innovation and political inventiveness.
Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001
ISBN 0485006340, 9780485006346
320 pages
PDF (no OCR)
Comment (1)Eugene W. Holland: Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, citizenship, communism, deterritorialization, labour, market, nomadology, politics, schizoanalysis, value
Nomad Citizenship argues for transforming our institutions and practices of citizenship and markets in order to release society from dependence on the state and capital. It changes Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomadology into a utopian project with immediate practical implications, developing ideas of a nonlinear Marxism and of the slow-motion general strike.
Responding to the challenge of creating philosophical concepts with concrete applications, Eugene W. Holland looks outside the state to analyze contemporary political and economic development using the ideas of nomad citizenship and free-market communism. Holland’s nomadology seeks to displace capital-controlled free markets with truly free markets. Its goal is to rescue market exchange, not perpetuate capitalism—to enable noncapitalist markets to coordinate socialized production on a global scale and, with an eye to the common good, to liberate them from capitalist control.
In suggesting the slow-motion general strike, Holland aims to transform citizenship: to renew, enrich, and invigorate it by supplanting the monopoly of state citizenship with plural nomad citizenships. In the process, he offers critiques of both the Clinton and Bush regimes in the broader context of critiques of the social contract, the labor contract, and the form of the state itself.
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2011
ISBN 0816666121, 9780816666126
344 pages
review (Benjamin Noys, review31)
Comment (0)Fadaiat: Freedom of Movement – Freedom of Knowledge (2006) [Spanish/English/Arabic]
Filed under book | Tags: · citizenship, gibraltar, globalisation, labour, migration, network society, technology
“The straits of Gibraltar is a mirror-territory of the transformations taking place in the world today: globalisation, migrations, borders, citizenship, network-society, communication, technologies… The border is a crossed-place, an extensive territory of life and mobile confinements where multiple social practices put pressure on established limits. New spaces and relationships emerge from and through the border between southern europe and northern africa.
The book and all it entails plays an important and irreplaceable role, but it is just a fragment of a process that goes far beyond it in terms of both time and subject matter. Here it opens new possible becomings that were mere conjectures until it was written; it is a line with relative autonomy running parallel to the other relatively autonomous part-projects and establishing fruitful exchanges among them, which in turn become an opportunity for new projects.
Through this process, and specially the publishing of this book, we want to contribute to the existence of new spaces of social and technological hybridisations that, by forging new paths, continually (re)invent world(s).”
A book was developed in connection to event Fadaiat: Freedom of Movement – Freedom of knowledge.
Authors: Pilar Monsell Prado, Pablo de Soto Suárez, Joan Escofet Planas, José Pérez de Lama, Marta Paz Naveiro, Mónica Lama Jiménez, Helena García Rodríguez, Sergio Moreno Páez
Published by Observatorio Tecnológico del Estrecho
209 pages
License: Aire Incodicional
PDF (Part 1: visuals; no OCR)
PDF (Part 2: articles)