Cornelia Vismann: Files: Law and Media Technology (2000/2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · bureaucracy, computing, document, governmentality, law, media archeology, media theory, technology, writing
“Quod non est in actis, non est in mundo. (What is not on file is not in the world.) Once files are reduced to the status of stylized icons on computer screens, the reign of paper files appears to be over. With the epoch of files coming to an end, we are free to examine its fundamental influence on Western institutions. From a media-theoretical point of view, subject, state, and law reveal themselves to be effects of specific record-keeping and filing practices. Files are not simply administrative tools; they mediate and process legal systems. The genealogy of the law described in Vismann’s Files ranges from the work of the Roman magistrates to the concern over one’s own file, as expressed in the context of the files kept by the East German State Security. The book concludes with a look at the computer architecture in which all the stacks, files, and registers that had already created order in medieval and early modern administrations make their reappearance.”
Originally published in German as Akten. Medientechnik und Recht, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 2000
Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2008
Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series
ISBN 080475151X, 9780804751513
187 pages
Review (Liam Cole Young, Theory, Culture & Society)
PDF (7 MB, updated on 2016-12-23)
Comment (0)Aradhana Sharma, Akhil Gupta (eds.): The Anthropology of the State: A Reader (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropology, bureaucracy, democracy, economy, feminism, governmentality, ideology, immigration, labour, neoliberalism, politics, power, production, society, state
This innovative reader brings together classic theoretical texts and cutting-edge ethnographic analyses of specific state institutions, practices, and processes and outlines an anthropological framework for rethinking future study of “the state”.
– Focuses on the institutions, spaces, ideas, practices, and representations that constitute the “state”.
– Promotes cultural and transnational approaches to the subject.
– Helps readers to make anthropological sense of the state as a cultural artifact, in the context of a neoliberalizing, transnational world.
Publisher Blackwell Publishing, 2006
ISBN 1405114681, 9781405114684
424 pages
Hessdörfer, Pabst, Ullrich (eds.): Prevent and Tame. Protest under (Self-)Control (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, control society, governmentality, neoliberalism, power, social movements, subjectivation, surveillance
The common dualistic approach to social movements tends to see power and resistance as separate and independent antagonists.
The contributors to this book aim to transcend that approach, arguing that to adequately analyze ongoing struggles, it is also critically important to trace the constitutive interconnectedness between social movements and power. This is the aim of the title “Prevent and Tame”: emergent strategies to prevent and tame protest—whether they are undertaken by the state or by factions within the movements themselves—have given rise to new kinds of social relations and regulations that call for a new approach to research on social movements and protest.
Inspired by Foucault and others, this book offers theoretical and empirical investigation into the implications that governmentality studies and subjectivation perspectives may have for a deeper understanding of the dynamics in the relationship between power and movements. The articles reflect on the effects of current neo-liberal or neo-social transformations on social movement practice, including the impact of surveillance, the criminalization and stigmatization of protest, and how these can lead movements to engage in self-taming behavior amongst themselves.
Taken as a whole, this book suggests that to take the struggles of social movements seriously, requires to acknowledge the complexity of the power dynamics in which they are involved. In so doing, the authors’ aim is not to tame protest by over-amplifying its apparent obstacles, but to prevent its energy from being pointlessly wasted or misdirected (i.e. by being spent in the wrong places, in false conflicts, or even in fighting the clouds they cast themselves).
Includes contributions by Stephen Gill, Peter Ullrich, Florian Heßdörfer, Andrej Holm, Anne Roth, Marco Tullney, Michael Shane Boyle, Darcy K. Leach, Sebastian Haunss and Nick Montgomery
Editors: Florian Hessdörfer, Andrea Pabst, Peter Ullrich
Publisher: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin, November 2010
Series: RLF Manuskripte, Volume 88
ISBN: 978-3-320-02246-4